The Observer: Kitty Empire's Top 10 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.

Black Thought may be best-known as part of The Roots, performing night after late night for Jimmy Fallon’s TV audience, yet the Philadelphia native concurrently boasts a staggering reputation as a stand-alone rapper. Though he’s earned GOAT nods from listeners for earth-shaking features alongside Big Pun, Eminem, and Rapsody, his solo catalog long remained relatively modest in size. Meanwhile, Danger Mouse had a short yet monumental run in the 2000s that made him one of that decade’s most beloved and respected producers. His discography from that period contains no shortage of microphone dynamos, most notably MF DOOM (as DANGERDOOM) and Goodie Mob’s CeeLo Green (as Gnarls Barkley). Uniting these low-key hip-hop powerhouses is the stuff of hip-hop dreams, the kind of fantasy-league-style draft you’d encounter on rap message boards. Yet *Cheat Codes* is real—perhaps realer than real. Danger Mouse’s penchant for quirkily cinematic, subtly soulful soundscapes remains from the old days, but the growth from his 2010s work with the likes of composer Daniele Luppi gives “Aquamarine” and “Sometimes” undeniable big-screen energy. Black Thought luxuriates over these luxurious beats, his lyrical lexicon put to excellent use over the feverish funk of “No Gold Teeth” and the rollicking blues of “Close to Famous.” As if their team-up wasn’t enough, an intergenerational cabal of rapper guests bless the proceedings. From living legend Raekwon to A$AP Rocky to Conway the Machine, New York artists play a pivotal role here. A lost DOOM verse, apparently from *The Mouse and the Mask* sessions, makes its way onto the sauntering and sunny “Belize,” another gift for the fans.

Mitski wasn’t sure she’d ever make it to her sixth album. After the release of 2018’s standout and star-making record *Be the Cowboy*, she simply had nothing left to give. “I think I was just tired, and I felt like I needed a break and I couldn\'t do it anymore,” she tells Apple Music. “I just told everyone on my team that I just needed to stop it for a while. I think everyone could tell I was already at max capacity.” And so, in 2019, she withdrew. But if creating became painful, not doing it at all—eventually—felt even worse. “I was feeling a deep surge of regret because I was like, ‘Oh my god, what did I do?’” she says. “I let go of this career that I had worked so hard to get and I finally got, and I just left it all behind. I might have made the greatest mistake of my life.” Released two years after that self-imposed hiatus, *Laurel Hell* may mark Mitski’s official return, but she isn’t exactly all in. Darkness descends as she moves back into her own musical world (“Let’s step carefully into the dark/Once we’re in I’ll remember my way around” are this album’s first words), and it feels like she almost always has one eye on her escape route. Such melancholic tendencies shouldn’t come as a surprise: Mitski Miyawaki is an artist who has always delved deep into her experiences as she attempts to understand them—and help us understand our own. More unexpected, though, is the glittering, ’80s-inspired synth-pop she often embraces, from “The Only Heartbreaker”—whose opening drums throw back to a-ha’s “Take On Me,” and against which Mitski explores being the “bad guy” in a relationship—to the bouncy, cinematic “Should’ve Been Me” and the intense “Love Me More,” on which she cries out for affection, from a lover and from her audience, against racing synths. “I think at first, the songs were more straightforwardly rock or just more straightforwardly sad,” she recalls. “But as the pandemic progressed, \[frequent collaborator\] Patrick \[Hyland\] and I just stopped being able to stay in that sort of sad feeling. We really needed something that would make us dance, that would make us feel hopeful. We just couldn’t stand the idea of making another sad, dreary album.” This being a Mitski record, there are of course still moments of insular intensity, from “Everyone” to “Heat Lightning,” a brooding meditation on insomnia. And underneath all that protective pop, this is an album about darkness and endings—of relationships, possibly of her career. And by its finish, Mitski still isn’t promising to stick around. “I guess this is the end, I’ll have to learn to be somebody else,” she says on “I Guess,” before simply fading away on final track “That’s Our Lamp.”

We don’t typically look to pop albums to answer our cultural moment, let alone to meet the soul hunger left in the wake of global catastrophe. But occasionally, an artist proves the form more malleable and capacious than we knew. With Laurel Hell, Mitski cements her reputation as an artist in possession of such power - capable of using her talent to perform the alchemy that turns our most savage and alienated experiences into the very elixir that cures them. Her critically beloved last album, Be the Cowboy, built on the breakout acclaim of 2016’s Puberty 2 and launched her from cult favorite to indie star. She ascended amid a fever of national division, and the grind of touring and pitfalls of increased visibility influenced her music as much as her spirit. Like the mountain laurels for this new album is named, public perception, like the intoxicating prism of the internet, can offer an alluring façade that obscures a deadly trap—one that tightens the more you struggle. Exhausted by this warped mirror, and our addiction to false binaries, she began writing songs that stripped away the masks and revealed the complex and often contradictory realities behind them. She wrote many of these songs during or before 2018, while the album finished mixing in May 2021. It is the longest span of time Mitski has ever spent on a record, and a process that concluded amid a radically changed world. She recorded Laurel Hell with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland throughout the isolation of a global pandemic, during which some of the songs “slowly took on new forms and meanings, like seed to flower.” Sometimes it’s hard to see the change when you’re the agent of it, but for the lucky rest of us, Mitski has written a soundtrack for transformation, a map to the place where vulnerability and resilience, sorrow and delight, error and transcendence can all sit within our humanity, can all be seen as worthy of acknowledgment, and ultimately, love.

“I always get deep into a record, but now I’m 100% fully operational,” Kurt Vile tells Apple Music. “I got a fully armed battle station.” The Philly singer-songwriter is referring to Overnight KV, or OKV, the new home studio he finished building just before the pandemic hit in 2020. It’s afforded Vile a level of creative independence he’s not felt since he started recording in his bedroom years ago. “Why do I always have to go to some producer\'s studio?” he asks. “It\'s on their terms. I\'m grateful for it, we got a lot of stuff done. But you could say nothing\'s been 100% my personality since my early, more lo-fi records. I was 100% guard down, just doing my thing, man.” His ninth LP (and first for Verve, the legendary jazz imprint) combines the experimental purity of those early recordings with the sort of “completely high-fidelity” feel that he says his studio can provide, though he did, to be clear, collaborate again with producer Rob Schnapf (Elliott Smith, Beck) both at home and in LA. The result, Vile says, is “kind of like some American folk version of shoegaze music”—a set of sidewinding pop (see: “Flyin \[like a fast train\],” originally written for Kesha) and classic rock (“Fo Sho”) that includes contributions from Cate Le Bon and Chastity Belt, as well as drumming from Stella Mozgawa (Warpaint) and Sarah Jones (Hot Chip, Harry Styles). “It’s just lived in, really, the whole record,” he says. “There\'s multiple records that were left behind. But that\'s the way it should be. That\'s like somebody who\'s a carpenter or something, always working in their shop. I feel like you\'re not meant to put everything out. Just the way I live my life.” Here, Vile tells the story behind a number of songs on the album. **“Goin on a Plane Today”** “I got a piano at my house—it\'s very meditative and I can go to it every day. I remember I\'d be touring \[2018’s\] *Bottle It In*, and I\'d be thinking up these records that I was going to make from home, and then when I was home I\'d go over to the piano and be like, ‘Oh, I\'m so stoked, I\'m going to get a lot of music done while I\'m here.’ And then be rudely awakened to the fact that, no, I’ve got to leave in two weeks. I talk about opening for Neil Young in the song, because I wrote it around the time that we opened for Neil Young with Promise of the Real in Quebec, in 2018. That really happened.” **“Palace of OKV in Reverse”** “I love that there\'s more two-minute jams on this record—you could say that’s not been the case since my first album, \[2008\'s\] *Constant Hitmaker*, with ‘Freeway.’ But there\'s a lot of secrets about ‘OKV in Reverse.’ There\'s just a certain groove to it that triggered my mind, and then those lyrics came pretty quick. I didn\'t sing it until later when I was at Rob Schnapf\'s studio in LA, on the fly. He\'s good at capturing that thing.” **“Like Exploding Stones”** “‘Pain ricocheting in my brain like exploding stones.’ Some people attribute that line to migraines, and I do get migraines, so that\'s fine. But in the moment when I wrote it, it\'s more just stress, something weighing down hard on my head. I was pretty bummed out about something when I wrote that song, and then I recorded it right on my Zoom recorder—pretty much just live acoustics, drumming, and singing live. I imagined guitars feeding back, and the Moog synthesizer making noise, feedback massaging my cranium. I had all those things in the demo. Yeah, that\'s the beauty: You can just exorcise demons.” **“Hey Like a Child”** “It’s a love song. I’ve known my wife since we were pretty young, but you don\'t have to take it all so literally, because in the moment when I was writing it, obviously I\'ve got children of my own. It’s got the shoegaze-y bend, but a jangle to it as well. And I knew that song had super poppy potential. We did an early version of it in my basement studio, but then I took it over to Rob Schnapf\'s and I replayed all the parts, and again, Sarah Jones, she just killed it on drums on that song. That song was made really quick.” **“Chazzy Don’t Mind”** “Courtney Barnett turned me on to Chastity Belt—they toured together on \[2017’s\] *I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone*. I liked their music immediately, but it creeps up on you because they sing about everyday things. Julia \[Shapiro’s\] lyrics are really emotional, sometimes funny but pretty real, and they have this cyclical playing that really resonates with me. I knew I wanted them on this song. Lydia \[Lund\] and Julia play guitar on it, and Annie \[Truscott\] plays violin on it, and they all sing. Annie, she\'s such an amazing musician, she’s got perfect pitch on the vocal. They all have an equally important role in the band, but it\'s her bass underneath it all that really gets that melancholy thing.” **“Wages of Sin”** “That\'s been one of my favorite songs of Springsteen’s for a long time—it’s got that melancholy, dark hypnotic thing. I knew I could sing the hell out of it and make it mine, but also stay true to his. Nobody\'s done that lately, but in the country music world that\'s what I like: There\'s a song that speaks to you, and often it\'s a deep cut or somebody hears a song written fresh off the presses, like a demo, and they\'re like, ‘That\'s my song.’ Well, this is that except it\'s been my song since my mid-twenties, and now here I am at 42. We got it. We nailed it. And Springsteen, I don\'t know—it\'d be hard for him to ignore it. He\'d have to make a conscious decision to ignore it. Something tells me him and Obama are going to be enjoying it soon.” **“Stuffed Leopard”** “It’s funny because I felt like ‘Wages of Sin’ was a centerpiece, and I wanted it to fade out. But then ‘Stuffed Leopard’ just crept up on me, and I realized I didn\'t fingerpick throughout the whole record. Lyrically, you\'re just looking at stuff around the house, and you\'re just clarifying it’s a toy, not a taxidermy leopard. Yeah, it\'s just a fingerpicker, man. What can I tell you? Can\'t help it.”

After recording *The Car*, there was, for “quite a long time, a real edit in process,” Arctic Monkeys leader Alex Turner tells Apple Music. Indeed, his UK rock outfit’s daring seventh LP sounds nothing if not *composed*—a set of subtle and stupendously well-mannered mid-century pop that feels light years away from the youthful turbulence of their historic 2006 debut, *Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not*. If, back then, they were writing songs with the intention of uncorking them onstage, they’re now fully in the business of craft—editing, shaping, teasing out the sort of sumptuous detail that reveals itself over repeated listens. “It’s obviously 10 songs, but, even more than we have done before, it just feels like it’s a whole,” he says. “It’s its own.” The aim was to pay more attention to dynamics, to economy and space. “Everything,” Turner says, “has its chance to come in and out of focus,” whether it’s a brushed snare or a feline guitar line, a feathered vocal melody or devastating turn of phrase. Where an earlier Monkeys song may have detonated outward, a blast of guitars and drums and syllables, these are quiet, controlled, middle-aged explosions: “It doesn\'t feel as if there\'s too many times on this record where everything\'s all going on at once.” On album opener “There’d Better Be a Mirrorball,” Turner vaults from a bed of enigmatic, opening-credit-like keys and strings (all arranged with longtime collaborator James Ford and composer Bridget Samuels) into scenes of a prolonged farewell. So much of its pain—its romance, its dramatic tension—is in what’s not said. “The feel of that minute-or-so introduction was what feels like the foundation of the whole thing,” he says. “And it really was about finding what could hang out with that or what could be built around the feel of that. The moment when I found a way to bridge it into something that is a pop song by the end was exciting, because I felt like we had somewhere to go.” For years, Turner has maintained a steady diet of side work, experimenting with orchestral, Morricone-like epics in The Last Shadow Puppets as well as lamplit bedroom folk on 2011’s *Submarine* EP, written for the film of the same name. But listen closely to *The Car* (and 2018’s *Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino* before it) and you’ll hear the walls between the band and his interests outside it begin to dissolve—the string arrangements throughout (but especially on “The Car”), the gently fingerpicked guitars (“Mr Schwartz”), the use of negative space (the slightly Reznor-y “Sculptures of Anything Goes”). “I think I was naive,” he says. “I think the first time I stepped out to do anything else was the first Puppets record, and at that moment, I remember thinking, ‘Oh, this is totally in its own place and it\'s going to have nothing to do with the Monkeys and what that was going to turn into.’ And I realize now that I don\'t know if that\'s really possible, for me anyway. It feels as if everything you do has an effect on the next thing.”

The contradiction of Bill Callahan’s 2010s output is how an artist seemingly so stoic and withdrawn could be so completely in love with everyday life. His performances get more nuanced and his metaphorical power richer every album, whether it’s the image of his infant daughter suspended angelically above the ground because everyone wants to carry her around (“First Bird”), or the way a horse inside a house reminds him of the way we have to ”bow our heads to get in and out of what we’re living in”—a mix of American surrealism and Buddhist humility he can safely call his own. And for a singer who once said that the only time he felt part of the world is when he was alone in his room (Smog’s “Ex-Con”), now he can’t wait to get out with the stroller for another trip around the neighborhood (“Natural Information”) with a horn section and backup singers in tow. Peace, love, and fun—and evidently hard-won.

From the beautiful to the jarring, intrepid explorer Callahan charts a passage through all kinds of territory, pitting dreams of dreams against dreams of reality. When he makes it back to us, his old friends 'n acquaintances, we are reminded how much of a world it can be out there - and in here as well, where we live everyday.

“I want to love unconditionally now.” Read on as Steve Lacy opens up about how he made his sophomore album in this exclusive artist statement. “Someone asked me if I felt pressure to make something that people might like. I felt a disconnect, my eyes squinted as I looked up. As I thought about the question, I realized that we always force a separation between the artist (me) and audience (people). But I am not separate. I am people, I just happen to be an artist. Once I understood this, the album felt very easy and fun to make. *Gemini Rights* is me getting closer to what makes me a part of all things, and that is: feelings. Feelings seem like the only real things sometimes. “I write about my anger, sadness, longing, confusion, happiness, horniness, anger, happiness, confusion, fear, etc., all out of love and all laughable, too. The biggest lesson I learned at the end of this album process was how small we make love. I want to love unconditionally now. I will make love bigger, not smaller. To me, *Gemini Rights* is a step in the right direction. I’m excited for you to have this album as your own as it is no longer mine. Peace.” —Steve Lacy

“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.

Extended guitar hero Oren Ambarchi returns with Shebang, the latest in the series of intricately detailed long-form rhythmic workouts that includes Quixotism (2014) and Hubris (2016). Like those records, Shebang features an international all-star cast of musical luminaries, their contributions recorded individually in locations from Sweden to Japan yet threaded together so convincingly (by Ambarchi in collaboration with Konrad Sprenger) that it’s hard to believe they weren’t breathing the same studio air. Expanding on the techniques used on Simian Angel (2019), we can never be entirely sure who is responsible for what we hear, as Ambarchi’s guitar is used to trigger everything from bass lines to driving piano riffs. Picking up from the staccato guitar patterns that ran through Hubris, Shebang’s single 35-minute track begins with a precisely interwoven lattice of chiming guitar figures, expanding Hubris’ monolithic pulse into a joyous, hyper-rhythmic melodicism that calls up points of reference as disparate as Albert Marcoeur, early Pat Metheny Group, and Henry Kaiser’s It’s A Wonderful Life. Building from isolated single notes into densely layered polyrhythms, the muted guitar tones are joined by subtle touches of shimmering Leslie cabinet tones and guitar synth. Simmering down and funnelling into a single note, the guitar stew is soon thickened by Joe Talia’s propulsive ride cymbal, which blossoms into a beautifully flowing yet rigorously snapped-to fusion funk, whose ever-shifting details skitter across the kit – think 70s heavyweights like Jack DeJohnette or Jon Christensen. An unexpected entry of guttural bass clarinet licks from Sam Dunscombe begins the series of instrumental features that pepper the remainder of the piece. Soon we hear from the legendary British pedal steel player B.J. Cole (hopefully known to some listeners from his outer-limits singer-songwriter masterpiece The New Hovering Dog or, failing that, ‘Tiny Dancer’), whose languorous yet uneasy lines float in and out of a shifting rhythmic foundation supported by a single note bass groove, cut through with aleatoric synth articulations Though single-mindedly occupying its rhythmic space throughout, Shebang’s dense ensemble sound is carefully composed while drawing on the free flow of improvisation, with individual voices momentarily coming to the fore and subtle changes in harmony and texture. Perhaps the most surprising of these shifts occurs around half-way through when the smoke of a buzzing synth crescendo from Jim O'Rourke clears to reveal something like a piano trio, with Ambarchi’s guitar-triggered piano patterns providing restless accompaniment to flowing melodic lines from Chris Abrahams of The Necks, while Johan Berthling’s double bass and Talia’s drums fill out the bottom end. Before long, things take another left turn as Julia Reidy’s rapidly picked 12-string guitar lines take centre stage, with O’Rourke’s monumental synth clouds hovering in the distance. The ensemble surges through a slow series of harmonic changes before the whole shebang dissolves into a delirious synthetic mirage. Bridging minimalism, contemporary electronics, and classic ECM stylings, and bringing together a cast of preternaturally talented contributors, Shebang is unmistakably the work of Oren Ambarchi: obsessively detailed, relentlessly rhythmic, unabashedly celebratory.