022: The only thing not falling apart is music
As has been a running theme for the last few years, the worse a year is, the better the soundtrack. Looking back over the year to try and pull together an AOTY list has been harder than I can ever remember. I couldn’t even keep it to twenty albums, so I’ve gone for a nice round 22. Catchy, eh? So, without further ado, here are my top 22 albums of the year:
Birds in Row - Gris Klein. The fourth album proper by the Belgian hardcore stalwarts absolutely floored me in the back end of this year. A perfect blend of the overwrought emotion of old school emo, post metal chord progressions, and furious hardcore is basically hitting all of my high points. Really looking forward to seeing these at ATG next year.
Ithaca - They Fear Us. A closer run thing for number one you could not find, this has been the year of Ithaca for me in many ways, from interviewing Djamila for All Creatives Now to seeing them play an absolutely incredible set at ATG, They Fear Us has been a constant play in my house. Metalcore at its most bleeding edge, taking in everything from prog to soul and pop, while never losing its sense of self.
Rolo Tomassi - Where Myth Becomes Memory. Another album showcasing just how versatile the intersections of metal and hardcore can be, flowing from hauntingly beautiful to crushingly heavy, sometimes within the same breath.
KEN Mode - Null. I’m not going to lie, 2022 has been a hard ride for me, and sometimes you need the soundtrack to hard times to be so unrelentingly grim that you have to grit your teeth just to listen to it. Enter KEN Mode.
Carpenter Brut - Leather Terror. At the opposite end of the joy spectrum, this mash up of synthwave, metal, and slasher movie vibes is deliriously good fun.
Crippled Black Phoenix - Banefyre. Arguably CBP’s strongest album to date, a blend of post rock, Floyd prog worship, folk horror, and an unerring sense that the world is going fully to shit, this is beautiful, epic, soaring, and gloomy as fuck.
Zeal & Ardor - Zeal & Ardor. Any project that starts off as an intellectual exercise — the question of "what if American slaves had embraced Satan instead of Jesus?" — should be doomed to run out of steam as soon as that idea runs aground, but Z&A keep getting stronger with every release. I’ve been lucky enough to see them twice this year, and they’re as good live as they are on record, a feat not easily achieved with music this densely brilliant.
Greg Puciato - Mirrorcell. Is there anyone in modern rock/pop/metal as versatile as the former Dillinger frontman? This latest work sees him funnelling his pop sensibilities through a hazy filter of 90’s alternative rock, and is utterly brilliant.
Cave In - Heavy Pendulum. I honestly thought Cave In would be done, following the death of Caleb and the wistful but uneventful Final Transmission album. But instead they further blended the lines between themselves and Converge and the myriad side projects of both by bringing in Nate Newton and releasing this absolute behemoth of sludgy alt metal.
Conjurer - Páthos. It might not quite hit the dizzy highs of Mire, but this sophomore offering by Britain’s unlikeliest metal superstars is still incredible, even if it leans into the bleak even more than its predecessor. Or maybe because of it.
Big Thief - Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You. With a more broad canvas than it has any right to, this fifth album by the ‘are they country, are they folk, are they indie’ megastars is a joy from start to finish, labels or no.
Cult of Luna - The Long Road North. Gone are the days when CoL could just shimmy their way to the top of this list — they have aged into their sound like a pair of old slippers and no longer seem to have the capacity to astound in the way they did on, say, Vertikal or Mariner — but this is still an astonishingly accomplished slice of post metal.
King Buffalo - Regenerator. Easily my favourite stone rock album of the year, this is all blissed out spacey jams and epic noodles for days. Lovely stuff.
Wilderun - Epigone. A mix of death and black metal with lashings of folk and prog — sounds like old-school Opeth, right? Well, actually, no. Wilderun don’t sound anything like I still really wish Opeth sounded like — their prog runs more to the Devin/Haken end of things — but they do scratch a lot of the same itch, and in gloriously flamboyant style.
The Callous Daoboys - Celebrity Therapist. While the Dillinger comparisons are obvious for these multi-genre mathcore lunatics, the band they put me more in mind of is Drowningman, with their abrupt about-turns and stupidly big pop hooks, and that can’t be a bad thing, right?
Hot Water Music - Feel the Void. A band I’ve always *meant* to check out, this year HWM put themselves so firmly above the parapet of other grungy post-hardcore that it’s all but impossible to put that off any longer.
The Comet is Coming - Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam. Groove-laden electro jazz that manages to sound like it’s being beamed in via the titular hyper-dimension whilst also sounding like it could only come from London.
40 Watt Sun - Perfect Light. A perfect distillation of the concept of an aching sadness. Beautiful, heart-rending doom-tinged folk.
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard. - Ice, Death, Planets, Mushrooms and Lava. One of five — five! — releases by Australia’s weirdest band, and in truth at least three of them could trouble this list. A ludicrous amount of great stuff in one year.
Working Men’s Club - Fear Fear. Like the Pet Shop Boys filtered through a boy racer’s club, this is a weirdly caustic pop album, all sharp electro sounds and caustic lyricism. An unexpected delight.
Elder - Innate Passage. Every year there’s an album that would be a lot higher up the list if it hadn’t only come out a few weeks ago. I can tell I’m going to live with this album for a long while, but it’s not there yet. An astounding album.
Tuskar - Matriarch. An album I really liked the first time round but then seeing them at ATG made me go back and let it give me a thoroughly good kicking. Brilliant two-piece sludge rock.
Ant there you have it!!! As always, I’ve made a playlist with songs from each of these albums and more besides. Okay, you got me. I actually made two playlists. because I JUST LOVE MAKING PLAYLISTS. The first one is called Soundscapes for Hellscapes and is a mixtape of 50 of the most crushing songs of 2022, sonically and emotionally.
The second is called Hold and be Held and is 50 songs that bring light to a too dark world. If you’re no so much into the screamy stuff, this is the playlist for you.
And I’ve also collected all twenty-two albums from this list and put them into a handy playlist for you.
Live Music
This year marked a proper return to going to see live music after a decade (or two) of not getting out to gigs as much as I want to, with two festivals (2000 Trees and ArcTanGent, both of which I thoroughly recommend) and half a dozen actual gigs in small rooms. I love live music, and had really thought my gig-going days might be on the wane, but the last few years have really put that silliness to bed. So here are my top ten live sets of this year.
Heck - 2000 Trees. Possible the most chaotic gig I’ve ever been to, by the end of the set the drummer had thrown his entire kit into the crowd, reassembled it, and was playing in the centre of the pit. Incredible.
Ithaca - ArcTanGent. An utter celebration of music, where every face walked away with a massive grin on their face from having just been stomped into oblivion by a band surely on the cusp of greatness.
The Cure - Cardiff Arena. I’ll admit that after an hour and a half of the Cure’s more meandering gloomy offerings I was worried that this would simply be ‘a very good gig’ rather than the transcendental experience I was longing for, but I needn’t have worried. The second encore was so packed with hits that it was almost orgasmic. Unbelievable stuff.
Cave In - Exchange, Bristol. I finally got to redress one of my biggest ever musical mistakes, walking out of a Jupiter-era Cave In set because it sounded nothing like what I was expecting. As good as the new album is I would have appreciated a few more of the old songs, but it was still a mighty fine time.
Conjurer - ArcTanGent. Sounding like the bowels of the earth opening up, when their vocalist screamed a verse away from the mic he was still somehow audible at the back of the tent. A band on top of their game.
Zeal & Ardor - ArcTanGent & Trinity Arts, Bristol. I saw Z&A play two very different sets. At ATG I could barely get in the tent as they played a show that sounded like it could fill an arena, while in Bristol I was at the front of a show by a band decimated by illness but still able to put on a mesmerising performance.
Idles - 2000 Trees. By the end of three days of incredible bands I was ready to go home, but the headlining performance of Bristol’s unlikeliest of crossover successes was like a shot of pure adrenaline. It takes a lot to make a field feel like a tiny club, but Idles managed that from the first song to the last.
Rolo Tomassi - 2000 Trees. A band absolutely at the top of their game, showcasing their remarkable breadth of sound, and with Eva sounding both spellbinding and monstrous throughout.
PUP - 2000 Trees. A joyous, raucous explosion of punk. I heard a lot this year on podcasts that I no longer listen to about how rubbish crowds are these days, but those critics clearly didn’t go to 2000 Trees, where a young crowd lapped up every discordant note of every band you could possibly go and see.
Devil Sold His Soul - ArcTanGent. DSHS are a band I’ve always liked but never loved, but this set made a hardcore fan of me, with their Will Haven-meets-Far brand of metalcore sounding absolutely massive.
So there you have it. A hell of a year for music. As a final note, for six of these shows, I had my daughter with me. I’ve had a lot of gig buddies over the years (including my fabulous wife), but there’s something remarkable about standing and watching live music with your own flesh and blood, watching them get the same joy from live music that you do. I hope we’re still gigging together for many years to come.
That’s it for my music round up for the year. I’ll be back tomorrow with the books, films, and TV that I’ve loved most this year.