Albums of the Year - 2022

Another year of music. This year I was pretty good at keeping up with my spreadsheet of new releases up until about September, at which point I’m still a bit behind. But since time’s running out, I’m finalizing my choices for the year now anyway.

This summer was especially great, with almost all of the top ones coming from April through August. Notably, we got Horse Jumper of Love and Bartees Strange on the same day in June, and then Beach Bunny and Pool Kids on the same day in July.

This year, I decided to separate full-length releases from everything else (EPs, splits, comps, etc), just because it was really hard to compare some of these.

Listening report

Naturally Spotify reports mostly “Bubblegrunge” and emo. Their numbers don’t mean much though; this year I managed drastically reduce my Spotify usage, listening primarily from VLC, Bandcamp, and physical media. I’d love see do a breakdown, but I’m afraid Last.fm doesn’t share which app/service submitted a scrobble.

Update 2023-01-03:

My Last.fm listening report dropped. Some technical glitch caused it to think I listened to a Cheekface song 90 times on the same day, which I for sure didn’t. But otherwise it’s pretty accurate.

Here are my favorite albums (not new releases) I discovered this year:

Past years

For fun, since I haven’t actually posted it in a while, here are some past year’s lists also: