Here goes my Top 10 Singles of 2022!
10.
Brandi Carlile (featuring Lucius)
Sunny, strummy and a pretty perfect Joni Mitchell-inspired love song with a chorus, like the tune's physical setting, that climbs higher than expected.
9.
Lead single from Taylor Swift's brilliantly marketed record. A synth-dripped bright pop tune with a mid-80s Tom Petty-esque beat and playful, occasionally evocative lyrics including congressmen and monsters on hills.
8.
After stomping through the drudgery of 2020 with the What's Your Pleasure? album, Ware released an inspiring and much-needed disco banger this year.
7.
After a 4-year hiatus, Santigold released two great singles off her Spirituals album. "High Priestess" is an energetic trek: "The energy I was looking for couldn’t be the old version of punk rock, it had to be the future sound of punk rock," she notes. "My Horror" is a deceptively simple autobiographical song about motherhood, living, and grappling with the world.
6.
It's hard not to think of summer of 2022 without this song. Not particularly groundbreaking nor the best track off the album, but a breezy tribute to house and an undeniable anthem of the year. The "Queens Remix" featuring Madonna and the song "Vogue" feels like a new dance club classic too.
5.
Incorporating a genteel library music track, Keith Mansfield's "The Loving Touch," to varying tempos and reverbs, Curry outlines systematic oppressions while walking with his "back towards the sun"
4.
Saba (featuring Krayzie Bone)
A sample of The Stylistics' "Everything" paired with the smooth-as-silk delivery of Krayzie Bone and Saba's evocative lyrics made for a choice single off the Chicago-based rapper's album that never wore out its welcome this year.
3.
Jaunty, sprightly earworm from Metronomy, acoustic-based with little synth flourishes, that I played over and over this year. Tune-Yards provided a good remix as well.
2.
The world is never ready for a new Kendrick Lamar track and "The Heart Part 5" rewarded 2022 in droves--not only in its haunting use of Marvin Gaye's "I Want You," its eerie, deep fake people-shifting music video, but Lamar's unreal delivery of potent lyrics. "N95" is another spitfire banger tearing down capitalism, materialism and the hypocrisies of the times.
1.
With strains of a-ha, constrained in a tight 2:47 runtime, "As It Was" is perhaps one of the most blissful-sounding melancholic pop tunes in ages; Harry Styles conquered radio waves and streaming with this smashing elegiac musing on where we've been and the uncertainty of where we are going.
A look back at the Top 10 singles of 2021.
My Spotify playlist of all my favorite tracks from 2022.
