Songs, 2022

20. Willare/Datkiddmix/Spookjamie/Rihanna “Sex With Me” (Pluggnb Remix)
Elite vibes

19. Weyes Blood “Twin Flame”
Only time we touched the highs of Titanic Rising

18. Grace Ives “Lullaby”
“It’s not something to be sad about/it’s just something I’ve been thinking about” contextualizes this song, this record, and my entire interior monologue

17. Nilufer Yanya “Anotherlife”
Painless flirts with the jittery guitar rock of Bloc Party but I like its wistful closer the most. (“Try” is my second-favorite song on the record for the same reason I prefer all slow Stones songs to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”)

16. Jerry Paper “Just Say Play”
What the indie rock movement is doing right now is very inspiring

15. Nav/Bryson Tiller “Reset”
A malessoul post come to life

14. Hikaru Utada “Somewhere Near Marseilles”
A journey

13. Brent Faiyaz “Jackie Brown”
A good Brent song is fascinating alchemy—he sounds like Babyface, sings from a “toxic” bro perspective, but blends classic R&B sounds and tropes with sharp writing, where the desire is tangible

12. Dreezy/Jeremih “In Touch”
The world needs Dreezy and Jeremih

11. Rosalia “Bizcochito”
Motomami was the first album in 15 years giving pure Kala

10. Saint Mercator “She Said”
At the risk of gooping on ya grinch Mercator warps standard sex-rap tropes as demonstrated by the graphic attention-to-detail in the verses and delirious yodeling that unites the shakily defined DIY “internet music” aesthetic to a proven lineage of rap outsiders like Lil B, Makonnen, even Soulja Boy

9. ZahSosaa “Stripper Anthem”
8. D Sturdy “Remember Me”
7. Asian Doll/Bandmanrill “Get Jumped”
I had a standoffish relationship with New York drill for reasons valid and not. First, “drill” to me will always mean Keef, Durk, Reese, Louie, Katie, etc. Second, there is a reason I don’t listen to grime. New York drill felt like scare-the-hoes music. And I’m a ho. The club-rap phenomenon of 2022 changed this. The Extensive-Sample Club-Rap microgenre is it for me. “Stripper Anthem” rides a Giveon hook as a lifeline, and that some of my favorite club rap songs use samples so blatantly reads as a throwback. I’m not so conservative I need this—I’m not trying to bring back the boom-bap. But it lets me key into the song’s core. “Remember Me” snakes a Jeremih sample around D Sturdy, who clocks that song’s DNA to sing a catchy, sweetly memorable hook. The breakout of this movement is Newark’s Bandmanrill, who wields his command of melody the sharpest and released a string of excellent singles before a decent full-length late in the year. I go back to Asian Doll’s Let’s Do a Drill from May—as a fan of hers from a distance, the choice to curate a drill record was something I wanted to hear. I didn’t have context for Bandmanrill yet but “Get Jumped” immediately struck me—I felt, not for the first or last time this year, I was listening to something new

6. Real Lies “Dream On”
I’m not an Anglophile except when I watch Peep Show

5. Bad Bunny “Titi Me Pregunto”
Bad Bunny already had a blockbuster year in 2020, releasing three records during a time you could not hear them in public. Un Verano Sin Ti dropped at the dawn of summer and corrected this. It was so ubiquitous it became impossible to imagine any gathering of people without hearing one of its songs

4. Texas Boyz “Awwready”
The drums hit harder here than in any other song from 2022. Between this and Tisakorean it’s clear men in Houston would rather dance in dead-end residential streets at 60 fps than go to therapy

3. Alan Braxe/DJ Falcon/Panda Bear “Step by Step” (12” version)
“Step by Step” became an important timestamp: there was everything before it, and everything after

2. Grupo Diez 4tro “El Fantasma”
What more could you want from a corrido sung by a zoomer backed by the most talented teenagers in the country who are playing their guitars at a fever pitch even before the bassist hits the nastiest drop of the year?

1. Tisakorean “Backseat”
Tisakorean’s one-two punch of short records from last year (pResiLLy and mr.siLLyfLow) were revelations in small bites, proof Tisa is as much of a DIY phenomenon as his most apparent forefathers. 1st Round Pick is ten minutes of amazing music and right in the middle is “Backseat,” a short ballad that packs the horniness of a teenage love anthem into a nesting doll of synths, analog warmth, winsome bars, and a breezy indie-rock songwriting style. It absorbs everything and spits it back out carefully.

Tisakorean is gifted at everything—singing, rapping, dancing, making videos, acting—a bottle of pure talent, someone the MacArthur Foundation should give $250,000 to because whatever watered-down academic take on his music and persona that is destined to come out of this fruitful Tisa era will no doubt be bastardized into something for museums or cynical and empty versions of this kind of vital Black virality and vision, completely missing that the best art sometimes doesn’t require much more than for you to nod your head and buy in.