Los Angeles Times' 10 Best Albums of 2022

Unique, strong, and sexy—that’s how Beyoncé wants you to feel while listening to *RENAISSANCE*. Crafted during the grips of the pandemic, her seventh solo album is a celebration of freedom and a complete immersion into house and dance that serves as the perfect sound bed for themes of liberation, release, self-assuredness, and unfiltered confidence across its 16 tracks. *RENAISSANCE* is playful and energetic in a way that captures that Friday-night, just-got-paid, anything-can-happen feeling, underscored by reiterated appeals to unyoke yourself from the weight of others’ expectations and revel in the totality of who you are. From the classic four-on-the-floor house moods of the Robin S.- and Big Freedia-sampling lead single “BREAK MY SOUL” to the Afro-tech of the Grace Jones- and Tems-assisted “MOVE” and the funky, rollerskating disco feeling of “CUFF IT,” this is a massive yet elegantly composed buffet of sound, richly packed with anthemic morsels that pull you in. There are soft moments here, too: “I know you can’t help but to be yourself around me,” she coos on “PLASTIC OFF THE SOFA,” the kind of warm, whispers-in-the-ear love song you’d expect to hear at a summer cookout—complete with an intricate interplay between vocals and guitar that gives Beyoncé a chance to showcase some incredible vocal dexterity. “CHURCH GIRL” fuses R&B, gospel, and hip-hop to tell a survivor’s story: “I\'m finally on the other side/I finally found the extra smiles/Swimming through the oceans of tears we cried.” An explicit celebration of Blackness, “COZY” is the mantra of a woman who has nothing to prove to anyone—“Comfortable in my skin/Cozy with who I am,” ” Beyoncé muses on the chorus. And on “PURE/HONEY,” Beyoncé immerses herself in ballroom culture, incorporating drag performance chants and a Kevin Aviance sample on the first half that give way to the disco-drenched second half, cementing the song as an immediate dance-floor favorite. It’s the perfect lead-in to the album closer “SUMMER RENAISSANCE,” which propels the dreamy escapist disco of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” even further into the future.

“I literally don’t take breaks,” ROSALÍA tells Apple Music. “I feel like, to work at a certain level, to get a certain result, you really need to sacrifice.” Judging by *MOTOMAMI*, her long-anticipated follow-up to 2018’s award-winning and critically acclaimed *EL MAL QUERER*, the mononymous Spanish singer clearly put in the work. “I almost feel like I disappear because I needed to,” she says of maintaining her process in the face of increased popularity and attention. “I needed to focus and put all my energy and get to the center to create.” At the same time, she found herself drawing energy from bustling locales like Los Angeles, Miami, and New York, all of which she credits with influencing the new album. Beyond any particular source of inspiration that may have driven the creation of *MOTOMAMI*, ROSALÍA’s come-up has been nothing short of inspiring. Her transition from critically acclaimed flamenco upstart to internationally renowned star—marked by creative collaborations with global tastemakers like Bad Bunny, Billie Eilish, and Oneohtrix Point Never, to name a few—has prompted an artistic metamorphosis. Her ability to navigate and dominate such a wide array of musical styles only raised expectations for her third full-length, but she resisted the idea of rushing things. “I didn’t want to make an album just because now it’s time to make an album,” she says, citing that several months were spent on mixing and visuals alone. “I don’t work like that.” Some three years after *EL MAL QUERER*, ROSALÍA’s return feels even more revolutionary than that radical breakout release. From the noisy-yet-referential leftfield reggaetón of “SAOKO” to the austere and *Yeezus*-reminiscent thump of “CHICKEN TERIYAKI,” *MOTOMAMI* makes the artist’s femme-forward modus operandi all the more clear. The point of view presented is sharp and political, but also permissive of playfulness and wit, a humanizing mix that makes the album her most personal yet. “I was like, I really want to find a way to allow my sense of humor to be present,” she says. “It’s almost like you try to do, like, a self-portrait of a moment of who you are, how you feel, the way you think.\" Things get deeper and more unexpected with the devilish-yet-austere electronic punk funk of the title track and the feverish “BIZCOCHITO.” But there are even more twists and turns within, like “HENTAI,” a bilingual torch song that charms and enraptures before giving way to machine-gun percussion. Add to that “LA FAMA,” her mystifying team-up with The Weeknd that fuses tropical Latin rhythms with avant-garde minimalism, and you end up with one of the most unique artistic statements of the decade so far.

“I like to prepare myself and prepare the surroundings to work my music,” Bad Bunny tells Apple Music about his process. “But when I get a good idea that I want to work on in the future, I hold it until that moment.” After he blessed his fans with three projects in 2020, including the forward-thinking fusion effort *EL ÚLTIMO TOUR DEL MUNDO*, one could forgive the Latin superstar for taking some time to plan his next moves, musically or otherwise. Somewhere between living out his kayfabe dreams in the WWE and launching his acting career opposite the likes of Brad Pitt, El Conejo Malo found himself on the beach, sipping Moscow Mules and working on his most diverse full-length yet. And though its title and the cover’s emoting heart mascot might suggest a shift into sad-boy mode, *Un Verano Sin Ti* instead reveals a different conceptual aim as his ultimate summer playlist. “It\'s a good vibe,” he says. “I think it\'s the happiest album of my career.” Recorded in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, the album features several cuts in the same elevated reggaetón mode that largely defined *YHLQMDLG*. “Efecto” and “Un Ratito” present ideal perreo opportunities, as does the soon-to-be-ubiquitous Rauw Alejandro team-up “Party.” Yet, true to its sunny origins, *Un Verano Sin Ti* departs from this style for unexpected diversions into other Latin sounds, including the bossa nova blend “Yo No Soy Celoso” and the dembow hybrid “Tití Me Preguntó.” He embraces his Santo Domingo surroundings with “Después De La Playa,” an energizing mambo surprise. “We had a whole band of amazing musicians,” he says about making the track with performers who\'d typically play on the streets. “It\'s part of my culture. It\'s part of the Caribbean culture.” With further collaborations from familiars Chencho Corleone and Jhayco, as well as unanticipated picks Bomba Estéreo and The Marías, *Un Verano Sin Ti* embodies a wide range of Latin American talent, with Bad Bunny as its charismatic center.

Let‘s start with that speech. In September 2022, as Taylor Swift accepted Songwriter-Artist of the Decade honors at the Nashville Songwriter Awards, the headline was that Swift had unveiled an admittedly “dorky” system she’d developed for organizing her own songs. Quill Pen, Fountain Pen, Glitter Gel Pen: three categories of lyrics, three imagined tools with which she wrote them, one pretty ingenious way to invite obsessive fans to lovingly obsess all the more. And yet, perhaps the real takeaway was the manner in which she spoke about her craft that night, some 20 years after writing her first song at the age of 12. “I love doing this thing we are fortunate enough to call a job,” she said to a room of her peers. “Writing songs is my life’s work and my hobby and my never-ending thrill. A song can defy logic or time. A good song transports you to your truest feelings and translates those feelings for you. A good song stays with you even when people or feelings don’t.” On *Midnights*, her tenth LP and fourth in as many years—*if* you don’t count the two she’s just rerecorded and buttressed with dozens of additional tracks—Swift sounds like she’s really enjoying her work, playing with language like kids do with gum, thrilling to the texture of every turn of phrase, the charge in every melody and satisfying rhyme. Alongside longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff, she’s set out here to tell “the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout \[her\] life,” as she phrased it in a message to Apple Music subscribers. It’s a concept that naturally calls for a nocturnal palette: slower tempos, hushed atmosphere, negative space like night sky. The sound is fully modern (synths you’d want to eat or sleep in, low end that sits comfortably on your chest), while the aesthetic (soft focus, wood paneling, tracklist on the cover) is decidedly mid-century, much like the *Mad Men*-inspired title of its brooding opener, “Lavender Haze”—a song about finding refuge in the glow of intimacy. “Talk your talk and go viral,” she sings, in reference to the maelstrom of outside interest in her six-year relationship with actor Joe Alwyn. “I just want this love spiral.” (A big shout to Antonoff for those spongy backup vocals, btw.) In large part, *Midnights* is a record of interiors, Swift letting us glimpse the chaos inside her head (“Anti-Hero,” wall-to-wall zingers) and the stillness of her relationship (“Sweet Nothing,” co-written by Alwyn under his William Bowery pseudonym). For “Snow on the Beach,” she teams up with Lana Del Rey—an artist whose instinct for mood and theatrical framing seems to have influenced Swift’s recent catalog—recalling the magic of an impossible night over a backdrop of pizzicato violin, sleigh bells, and dreamy Mellotron, like the earliest hours of Christmas morning. “I’ve never seen someone lit from within,” Swift sings. “Blurring out my periphery.” But then there’s “Bejeweled,” a late, *1989*-like highlight on which she announces to an unappreciative partner, a few seconds in: “And by the way, I’m going out tonight.” And then out Swift goes, striding through the center of the song like she would the room: “I can still make the whole place shimmer,” she sings, relishing that last word. “And when I meet the band, they ask, ‘Do you have a man?’/I could still say, ‘I don’t remember.’” There are traces of melancholy layered in (see: “sapphire tears on my face”), but the song feels like a triumph, the sort of unabashed, extroverted fun that would have probably seemed out of place in the lockdown indie of 2020’s *folklore* and *evermore*. But here, side by side with songs and scenes of such writerly indulgence, it’s right at home—more proof that the terms “singer-songwriter” and “universal pop star” aren’t mutually exclusive ideas. “What’s a girl gonna do?” Swift asks at its climax. “A diamond’s gotta shine.”

Midnights is the tenth studio album by American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, released on October 21, 2022, via Republic Records. Announced at the 2022 MTV Video Music Awards, the album marks Swift's first body of new work since her 2020 albums Folklore and Evermore.

Alvvays never intended to take five years to finish their third album, the nervy joyride that is the compulsively lovable Blue Rev. In fact, the band began writing and cutting its first bits soon after releasing 2017’s Antisocialites, that stunning sophomore record that confirmed the Toronto quintet’s status atop a new generation of winning and whip-smart indie rock. Global lockdowns notwithstanding, circumstances both ordinary and entirely unpredictable stunted those sessions. Alvvays toured more than expected, a surefire interruption for a band that doesn’t write on the road. A watchful thief then broke into singer Molly Rankin’s apartment and swiped a recorder full of demos, one day before a basement flood nearly ruined all the band’s gear. They subsequently lost a rhythm section and, due to border closures, couldn’t rehearse for months with their masterful new one, drummer Sheridan Riley and bassist Abbey Blackwell. At least the five-year wait was worthwhile: Blue Rev doesn’t simply reassert what’s always been great about Alvvays but instead reimagines it. They have, in part and sum, never been better. There are 14 songs on Blue Rev, making it not only the longest Alvvays album but also the most harmonically rich and lyrically provocative. There are newly aggressive moments here—the gleeful and snarling guitar solo at the heart of opener “Pharmacist,” or the explosive cacophony near the middle of “Many Mirrors.” And there are some purely beautiful spans, too—the church- organ fantasia of “Fourth Figure,” or the blue-skies bridge of “Belinda Says.” But the power and magic of Blue Rev stems from Alvvays’ ability to bridge ostensible binaries, to fuse elements that seem antithetical in single songs—cynicism and empathy, anger and play, clatter and melody, the soft and the steely. The luminous poser kiss-off of “Velveteen,” the lovelorn confusion of “Tile by Tile,” the panicked but somehow reassuring rush of “After the Earthquake”. The songs of Blue Rev thrive on immediacy and intricacy, so good on first listen that the subsequent spins where you hear all the details are an inevitability. This perfectly dovetailed sound stems from an unorthodox—and, for Alvvays, wholly surprising—recording process, unlike anything they’ve ever done. Alvvays are fans of fastidious demos, making maps of new tunes so complete they might as well have topographical contour lines. But in October 2021, when they arrived at a Los Angeles studio with fellow Canadian Shawn Everett, he urged them to forget the careful planning they’d done and just play the stuff, straight to tape. On the second day, they ripped through Blue Rev front-to-back twice, pausing only 15 seconds between songs and only 30 minutes between full album takes. And then, as Everett has done on recent albums by The War on Drugs and Kacey Musgraves, he spent an obsessive amount of time alongside Alvvays filling in the cracks, roughing up the surfaces, and mixing the results. This hybridized approach allowed the band to harness each song’s absolute core, then grace it with texture and depth. Notice the way, for instance, that “Tom Verlaine” bursts into a jittery jangle; then marvel at the drums and drum machines ricocheting off one another, the harmonies that crisscross, and the stacks of guitar that rise between riff and hiss, subtle but essential layers that reveal themselves in time. Every element of Alvvays leveled up in the long interim between albums: Riley is a classic dynamo of a drummer, with the power of a rock deity and the finesse of a jazz pedigree. Their roommate, in-demand bassist Blackwell, finds the center of a song and entrenches it. Keyboardist Kerri MacLellan joined Rankin and guitarist Alec O’Hanley to write more this time, reinforcing the band’s collective quest to break patterns heard on their first two albums. The results are beyond question: Blue Rev has more twists and surprises than Alvvays’ cumulative past, and the band seems to revel in these taken chances. This record is fun and often funny, from the hilarious reply-guy bash of “Very Online Guy” to the parodic grind of “Pomeranian Spinster.” Alvvays’ self-titled debut, released when much of the band was still in its early 20s, offered speculation about a distant future—marriage, professionalism, interplanetary citizenship. Antisocialites wrestled with the woes of the now, especially the anxieties of inching toward adulthood. Named for the sugary alcoholic beverage Rankin and MacLellan used to drink as teens on rural Cape Breton, Blue Rev looks both back at that country past and forward at an uncertain world, reckoning with what we lose whenever we make a choice about what we want to become. The spinster with her Pomeranians or Belinda with her babies? The kid fleeing Bristol by train or the loyalist stunned to see old friends return? “How do I gauge whether this is stasis or change?” Rankin sings during the first verse of the plangent and infectious “Easy on Your Own?” In that moment, she pulls the ties tight between past, present, and future to ask hard questions about who we’re going to become, and how. Sure, it arrives a few years later than expected, but the answer for Alvvays is actually simple: They’ve changed gradually, growing on Blue Rev into one of their generation’s most complete and riveting rock bands.

When Angel Olsen came to craft her sixth album, *Big Time*, the US singer-songwriter had been through, well, a big time. In 2021—just three days after she came out to her parents—her father died; soon after, she lost her mother. Amid it all (and, of course, with the global pandemic as a backdrop), Olsen was falling deep for someone new. *Big Time*, then, is an album that explores the light of new love alongside the dark devastation of loss and grief. Understandably, Olsen—who started work on *Big Time* just three weeks after her mother’s funeral—questioned whether she could make it at all. “It was a heavy time in my life,” she tells Apple Music. “It was the first time I walked into a studio and I had the option of canceling, because of some of the stuff that was going on. But I told my manager, ‘I just wanna try it.’” Working with producer Jonathan Wilson (Father John Misty, Conor Oberst) in a studio in Topanga Canyon, Olsen kept her expectations low and the brief loose. “Essentially, what I told everyone was, ‘I don’t need to turn a pedal steel on its head here, I just want to hear a classic,’” she says. “What would the Neil Young backing band do if they reined it in a little and put the vocals as the main instrument? If you overthink things, you’re really going down into a hole.” The starting point was “All the Good Times,” a song Olsen wrote on tour in 2017/18, and which she envisaged giving to a country singer like Sturgill Simpson. But it had planted a seed. On *Big Time*, she goes all in on country and Americana, inspired by her cherished hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, as well as by artists including Lucinda Williams, Big Star, and Dolly Parton. That sound reaches its peak on the title track, a woozy, waltzing love song that nods to the brighter side of this album’s title: “I’m loving you big time, I’m loving you more,” Olsen sings to her partner Beau Thibodeaux, with whom she wrote the song. In its embrace of simplicity, *Big Time* feels like a deep exhale—and a stark contrast to 2019’s glossy, high-drama *All Mirrors* (though you will find shades of that here, such as on the string- and piano-laden “Through the Fires” or closer “Chasing the Sun”). That undone palette also lays Olsen’s lyrics bare. And if you’ve ever been shattered by the singer-songwriter’s piercing lyricism, you may want to steel yourself. Here, Olsen’s words are more affecting, honest, and raw than ever before, as she navigates not just love and loss but also self-acceptance (“I need to be myself/I won\'t live another lie,” she sings on “Right Now”), our changed world post-pandemic (“Go Home”), and moving forward after the worst has happened. And on the album’s exquisite final track, “Chasing the Sun,” Olsen allows herself to do just that, however tentatively. “Everyone’s wondered where I’ve gone,” she sings. “Having too much fun… Spending the day/Driving away the blues.”

Fresh grief, like fresh love, has a way of sharpening our vision and bringing on painful clarifications. No matter how temporary we know these states to be, the vulnerability and transformation they demand can overpower the strongest among us. Then there are the rare, fertile moments when both occur, when mourning and limerence heighten, complicate and explain each other; the songs that comprise Angel Olsen’s Big Time were forged in such a whiplash. Big Time is an album about the expansive power of new love, but this brightness and optimism is tempered by a profound and layered sense of loss. During Olsen’s process of coming to terms with her queerness and confronting the traumas that had been keeping her from fully accepting herself, she felt it was time to come out to her parents, a hurdle she’d been avoiding for some time. “Finally, at the ripe age of 34, I was free to be me,” she said. Three days later, her father died and shortly after her mother passed away. The shards of this grief—the shortening of her chance to finally be seen more fully by her parents—are scattered throughout the album. Three weeks after her mother’s funeral she was on a plane to Los Angeles to spend a month in Topanga Canyon, recording this incredibly wise and tender new album. Loss has long been a subject of Olsen’s elegiac songs, but few can write elegies with quite the reckless energy as she. If that bursting-at-the-seams, running downhill energy has come to seem intractable to her work, this album proves Olsen is now writing from a more rooted place of clarity. She’s working with an elastic, expansive mastery of her voice—both sonically and artistically. These are songs not just about transformational mourning, but of finding freedom and joy in the privations as they come.

Far from the blockbuster pop of his 2016 debut, *Nine Track Mind*, or the seductive early-’90s R&B of 2018’s *Voicenotes*, Charlie Puth’s third LP is about the pop star’s sense of interiority. Written with what he calls “feelings first, music to follow,” it’s about the two biggest breakups of his life: a romantic relationship in 2019 and his former record label. If there is a single theme that binds the songs together, he claims it’s bitterness, but a better word might be ‘catharsis.’ “These thoughts spin in my head like a dishwasher,” he tells Apple Music. “I put them against a beat, add some melody, and when the song is finished, it’s like putting a letter in a glass bottle and sending it off into the ocean.” The overall effect is a richer sound, from the stacked ’80s synth-pop of “There’s a First Time for Everything” to the 2000s pop rock of “Smells Like Me” and the sole collaboration, “Left and Right,” featuring BTS’s Jung Kook. “I don\'t hold any sort of resentment for any of the people in those parties that I openly sing about on this record. I have nothing against them,” he says. “But it was important for me to get all this wording out on this album.” Below, Puth walks Apple Music through *CHARLIE*, track by track. **“That’s Hilarious”** “All of these songs come with combining an ugly and a beautiful thing together. In this song, I wanted the lyrics to be ugly and beautiful at the same time, just like I wanted the sound to be ugly and beautiful as well. It starts with pretty chords, then the pre-chorus lyric comes in: ‘You took away a year of my fucking life.’ That’s not exactly subtle. Almost at the minute mark, there’s a really low sine-wave bass that I ran through this Mike Dean plug-in that made it sound super distorted. That is representative of what was the most turbulent time in my life, where I was most uncomfortable.” **“Charlie Be Quiet!”** “I came up with that heavily syncopated, verselike melody as the chorus while going on a walk. I was listening to ‘The Whisper Song,’ produced by Mr. Collipark for the Ying Yang Twins. I thought, ‘Why has no one made a song where someone’s whispering?’ Then, in the second half of the chorus, you have the illusion of it getting louder for the listener, but it’s actually all mastered to the same level. You just jumped the octave.” **“Light Switch”** “I wrote and produced the record ‘STAY’ for Justin Bieber and The Kid LAROI, so I was in a very fast mood. I wanted to make fast music, that’s where this started from. I’ve always been obsessed with Broadway plays and cartoons—how they would use music to accentuate movements on the stage. If someone’s tiptoeing, you hear a pizzicato string. I literally saw a light switch, and I was like, ‘What do you do with a light switch? You turn the light switch on.’ OK, let’s be really corny. And so, ‘You turn me on like a light switch’ was it. Maybe the Broadway songs stay Broadway songs for a reason.” **“There’s a First Time for Everything”** “During the time I was making this song, I was exploring new people, taking part in activities that I had never really partaken in before. I’ll say lightly, there’s the first time for everything, and you have one life. There was this sense of euphoria in my mind, just knowing that there’s an open world out there, and that’s what I wanted the record to sonically match.” **“Smells Like Me”** “It’s supposed to be the song that you hear in the beginning of a 2000s reality show, like *The Hills*. It’s a very ugly word, ‘smells,’ and it doesn\'t sing very well. What sound represents the word ‘smells’? So, I just screamed into the microphone and Auto-Tuned that, so it became distorted and robotic. Then came that dreamy arpeggio. It reminded me of *The Little Mermaid*.” **“Left and Right”** “This song is simple. You can’t eat at a Michelin-starred restaurant every night. Sometimes you just got to get a burger and fries from McDonald’s: three chords, fun, and not about anything super heavy. I loved that dichotomy of how BTS\'s music is very well-produced, very crispy, very bright, and this song is the opposite. Jung Kook’s voice is usually associated with big, bright, powerful K-pop chords, and putting it under that Red Hot Chili Peppers type of bass, grunginess—I really liked that combination.” **“Loser”** “This song started off with the title. I was in the shower, recalling a time where I felt like I really messed it up with somebody. I thought that I lost them forever. I felt like a loser. I’m a singer living in LA, I’m seeing too many people, and I’m a loser. I followed up with, ‘How’d I ever lose her?’ And it just happens to rhyme. It sounds like a nursery rhyme that’s been around forever. Just a self-deprecating, sad one.” **“When You’re Sad I’m Sad”** “This is a song about being manipulated. When you’re sad, I’m sad. If you break up with me, and you move on with someone else, and you then come back to me, saying, ‘I made a big mistake,’ I’m going to forget about all my morals, and I’m going to swallow all my pride with one huge, sodalike gulp, and I’m going to go over to your house. I\'m going to console you and comfort you because I am manipulated into loving you.” **“Marks on My Neck”** “I was seeing someone new. I remember waking up the next morning with my neck all bruised up, from some unclipped fingernails. And I’m like, ‘Oh, my god. I got to cover this up. I’m driving up to see my parents right now.’ We lost touch, so the memory of this person started to fade away, as did the marks on my neck. They started to heal. The parallel is interesting—these marks fade the more my memory fades.” **“Tears on My Piano”** “I remember seeing Bruce Springsteen play Giants Stadium and his audience screaming along. Clarence Clemons played this saxophone solo on ‘Jungleland,’ and 50,000 fans were screaming, and there were no lyrics. ‘One day, I’m going to write a song where people can scream along to the non-existing lyrics, just the melody.’ And with that in mind, I came up with the melody, ‘These tears on my piano,’ where the piano melody would be singable. The piano part almost sounds a little sloppy because my fingers were wet from all the tears falling out of my eyes, hitting the piano.” **“I Don’t Think That I Like Her”** “Travis Barker added a really important layer of drums amongst the synthetic drums. It gave the song something that I just wouldn’t be able to do on my own. I like a singer singing something and the listener thinking the opposite. Like ‘Missing You’ by John Waite, where he says, ‘I ain’t missing you at all/Since you’ve been gone.’ Of course, you’re missing this person. You’re in denial. I’m in denial on this song, and I wanted to say that without saying that.” **“No More Drama”** “The album starts off bitter and self-correcting. ‘No More Drama’ is me waving goodbye to all those other 11 songs, sailing on to the next year of my life as a well-seasoned person. I’m ready to move on to the next. It’s the perfect ending punctuation for this album.”

Ten years on from Wizkid’s debut single, 2020 witnessed the Nigerian’s coronation as an undisputed Afrobeats icon. Global names including Justin Bieber and Damian Marley as well as emerging ones (see: Tems and producer P2J) helped Wizkid’s fourth album *Made in Lagos* strike a sonic balance to electrify bases at home and overseas, and unlocked fresh dimensions to his signature Afro-fusion. “That was where I\'m from. And now you know it’s time for me to show the world what else we actually need at this moment,” Wizkid tells Apple Music. “And that’s a whole lot of love. I\'m reminding myself, reminding the world, and reminding everybody.” On *More Love, Less Ego*, the task is made smoother with P2J again by his side. Their percussive, midtempo palette makes for a rich, winning combo, and the duo lean into it here—with Wizkid’s pillowy vocals and the bright, unifying themes of passion and celebration the ideal complements. But, as the title suggests, a more emotionally exposed artist emerges across the album’s 13 tracks. “All the time, I want to show up as my highest self,” he says. “I\'m really trying to show how God has blessed me with this talent and what I can do with it. And I’m here on earth to take this to the highest of my abilities.” As Wizkid’s Grammy-nominated “Essence” galvanized the thrilling rise of Tems, on “2 Sugar”—a sultry, toe-tapping duet—Ayra Starr is the beneficiary of the Starboy’s magic touch. And it’s far from the only inspired collaboration. Wizkid\'s cultural crosswinds take in talent including Jamaica’s breakout stars Shenseea and Skillibeng (“Slip N Slide”) and British Nigerians Skepta and Naira Marley (“Wow”) in a confident show of the diaspora’s effortless genre-fusing. Amapiano, meanwhile, is also explored on album highlight “Plenty Loving”—indicating another rich area for Wizkid to mine in the future. “I’ve been in the clubs for the past couple months—traveling, doing shows, touring,” he says. “Of course, I\'ve been partying to amapiano. I\'ve been making that \[sound\] for years, with \[DJ\] Maphorisa back in South Africa. So I’ve made what I really love and just put it out there. I can do amapiano, I can do music from Mali, I can do sounds from anywhere, I\'m African.”