Big JoanieBack HomeKill Rock Stars
Real LiesLad AshUnreal
SuedeAutofictionBMG
Horse LordsComradely ObjectsRVNG Intl.
Claire RousayEverything Perfect Is Already HereShelter Press
ScudfmINNITDash The Henge
The Soft Pink TruthIs It Going To Get Any Deeper Than This?Thrill Jockey
MoundaboutFlowers Rot, Bring Me StonesRocket Recordings
iromThe Liquified Throne Of Simplicitytak:til
Oren AmbarchiShebangDrag City
Both Ambarchi’s 2022 albums, Shebang and Ghosted, are marked by careful pace and precision. Musically, both of these albums exemplify the richness of letting one, simple melody branch out, seeing how repetition and layering can subtly, even imperceptibly, alter the trajectory of a phrase. On Shebang, these shifts come through in radiant waves. The feeling of the album is often optimistic – flickering, vibrant hues emanate from the ever-growing patterns that Ambarchi and his collaborators establish together. At times, its exuberance feels like a celebration, but it never gets too loud or boisterous. Instead, Ambarchi draws from the power of potential energy, letting sound build and churn in quietude, never quite rupturing.
Emeka Ogboh6°30’33.372″N 3°22′.66″EDanfotronics
As with Beyond The Yellow Haze, Ogboh pairs those recordings – of frenzied traffic jams and personal conversations – with deeply hypnotic rhythms (‘Verbal Drift’, ‘Ayilara’) and chugging techno beats (‘No Counterfeit’) that, vitally, afford his other sounds significant space to breathe. Beautifully capturing the disorder that can come with navigating Lagos’ hectic streets on public transport via fittingly noisy recordings of just that, there’s a paradoxically soothing quality to the way that Ogboh weaves together all of his source material and the dub-indebted percussion that runs through the record.
The Ephemeron LoopPsychonautic EscapismHeat Crimes
Redspiders’ realities of autism, ADHD and trans identity shapeshift through languid flashes of dream pop ambience, doom and hardgrind. Guitars, drums and vocals interlace, darting between hyper-speed death metal, psychedelic dub and breakcore in this stunning solo release. Psychonautic Escapism, an album full of continual sonic and poetic transformation, took 14 years to make. Redspiders describes The Ephemeron Loop as coming into existence at a crucial juncture in the formation of her identity, including "my becoming as a trans woman, my understanding of neurodivergence, and my experimentation with mind-altering substances."
Kendrick LamarMr. Morale & The Big SteppersTop Dawg Entertainment
The crown of thorns that he has worn in promotional imagery, the album’s cover, and indeed his generational Glastonbury headline set, might be interpreted as a sign of the megastar messiah complex trope, but as he revealed onstage at Worthy Farm, "I wear this crown as a representation, so you never forget one of the greatest prophets that ever walked this earth. They judge you, they judge Christ." If Mr. Morale does have a message, it’s one that Lamar allows a higher power to provide. As he raps on ‘Worldwide Steppers’, in the time between this album and his last one, DAMN., he had "writer’s block for two years, nothin’ moved me / Asked God to speak through me, that’s what you hear now."
Sea PowerEverything Was ForeverGolden Chariot
Though it’s not one of the most obvious songs on the album, ‘Lakeland Echo’ is the key that unlocks it. It starts with just a quiet vocal from Hamilton, seemingly echoing the voices of his late parents: "Turn the tape on / That’s a grand track / That’s a good one." It builds and builds to hover in a beautifully poised moment, emotion that is no less tender for its restraint. The song becomes even more poignant when you watch the video that features footage of the Yan and Hamilton’s late parents intercut with shots of the area the family grew up in. At the end, their old man disappears into the distance over a rise in the road, raising his arms in triumph, as if in celebration of his sons. It’s incredibly touching. To think upon loss, to look to the past, to venerate our forebears, does not have to be nostalgia as the reductive, negative energy that holds so many (by ‘so many’ I mean ‘our nation’) back, but as reflective, emancipatory and, curiously, realistic. "It’s not for everyone," Hamilton sings, perhaps again channelling Ronald’s views on Sea Power’s music. That’s at the crux of things for me – "it’s not for everyone" doesn’t have to be an admission of failure, but a comfort that some precious things are going to be beloved by a devoted few.
DeciusDecius Vol. IThe Leaf Label
That’s not to say it’s a gay or straight or even just a sex album. That’s just me. Maybe that’s you too. To say that this would sound ideal while taking a fist might make you cough on your sourdough. It also works on a swift commute, putting a kink in your step as you head home from the station. The purpose of art is to reflect something back that you recognise in it, is it not? Well, Decius Vol. I makes me feel like that. That it sounds perfect in dank basements, large inhuman cavernous cathedrals of dance, or some shitty £5 headphones proves it works. Vol. I is for both the big rooms and the dark rooms.
Richard DawsonThe Ruby CordDomino
The album is the third part of a trilogy that includes the feudal Peasant and the damning state of the nation address 2022. There’s always been a strain of the apocalyptic in Dawson’s work – ‘Ogre’ from Peasant begins with the feel of Under Milk Wood if it took place during a nuclear winter – and it reaches its apotheosis with The Ruby Cord. Yet this is not really an album about the future. Few works about the future are really. It’s about the present. It’s about the different meanings of the word lost and escape. It’s about survival, binds, exile, kinship, ruin, memory, nature. It’s about looking outward, as well as inward, something that has made all the difference in Dawson’s work, by his admission. Far from exalting being a recluse, it suggests going outside to see what you might find. If it’s about the apocalypse at all, it’s about the futility of fantasising about being among the last people on earth and the freedom it would bring. Why wait that long? The last days are already close. They always have been.
CarolinecarolineRough Trade
As well as singles ‘Skydiving’, ‘Dark blue’ and ‘Good morning’, the record consists of three more long-form songs. The first is ‘IWR’ (which stands for ‘I Was Right’), the group’s most straightforwardly beautiful song on which a lengthy repeated vocal line, sung as a group, serene flowing violins, and repetitious chiming guitars all lattice together. ‘Engine’, meanwhile, consists of one crescendo after another, the gaps between them shortening as the song progresses until the music is a grand, clattering mess. Closing the album is ‘Natural death’. Its first half is stark, just a fragile vocal and uneasy scratches of violin, and its second sees the band dive into complete abstraction, arrhythmic guitar chords, anchorless vocals and crashing cymbals, clattering against one another all out of time; it’s as if the record’s coming apart at the joints, the constituent parts that the band had suspended in mid-air as a beautiful whole now plummeting down piece by piece.
Diamanda GalasBroken GargoylesIntravenal Sound Operations
Broken Gargoyles makes most contemporary black metal, edgelord power electronics or exploring-feminity-through-witchcraft-wailers (there are a lot of Fisher Price Diamandas around at the moment) sound like they’re auditioning for a role in a local production of an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. In this album, Diamanda Galás has produced not only one of her finest works, but a record that is equal and arguably surpasses other records that have the capacity to swallow you whole and spit you out that have been released in the past decade or so – Sunn O)))’s Monoliths & Dimensions, Scott Walker’s Bish Bosch, for instance. No other new record you’ll hear in 2022 so beautifully explores the limits of what the human voice is able to do, and the stories it is able to give life to while doing so. A masterpiece.
JockstrapI Love You Jennifer BRough Trade
Closer ’50/50 (Extended)’ is a grinding dubstep track, as opposed to the emotive overtones on most of the record. That doesn’t diminish Jockstrap’s sincerity but shows the way emotions can be suppressed or transformed through a heavy dancefloor workout. The fact that both members are 24-year-olds partly explains the choice of their artistic names as well as the title of their debut record. As you age, levels of vulnerability gradually stabilise. The themes the group explore are familiar to the majority of those living on this planet and, particularly, in its most populated parts. Anxiety, alienation, longing, tidal waves of desire, pain resulting from acknowledging one’s ignorance and arrogance, etc., etc. After all, I Love You Jennifer B could be a statement on a wall of a residential block, inscribed by a smitten teenager.
The Quietus Albums Of The Year 2022
- 1: Jockstrap – I Love You Jennifer B
- 2: Diamanda Galás – Broken Gargoyles
- 3: caroline – caroline
- 4: Richard Dawson – The Ruby Cord
- 5: Decius – Decius Vol. I
- 6: Sea Power – Everything Was Forever
- 7: Kendrick Lamar – Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers
- 8: The Ephemeron Loop – Psychonautic Escapism
- 9: Emeka Ogboh – 6°30’33.372″N 3°22′.66″E
- 10: Oren Ambarchi – Shebang
- 11: Širom – The Liquified Throne Of Simplicity
- 12: Moundabout – Flowers Rot, Bring Me Stones
- 13: The Soft Pink Truth – Is It Going To Get Any Deeper Than This?
- 14: SCUDFM – INNIT
- 15: Claire Rousay – Everything Perfect Is Already Here
- 16: Horse Lords – Comradely Objects
- 17: Suede – Autofiction
- 18: Real Lies – Lad Ash
- 19: Big Joanie – Back Home
- 20: Persher – Man With The Magic Soap
- 21: Eros – A Southern Code
- 22: One More Grain – Beans On Toast With Pythagoras
- 23: Bill Orcutt – Music For Four Guitars
- 24: Special Interest – Endure
- 25: Mary Halvorson – Amaryllis / Belladonna
- 26: Wormrot – Hiss
- 27: Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling, Andreas Werliin – Ghosted
- 28: Nze Nze – Adzi Akal
- 29: Sarahsson – The Horgenaith
- 30: Sarah Davachi – Two Sisters
- 31: Shovel Dance Collective – The Water Is The Shovel Of The Shore
- 32: The Utopia Strong – International Treasure
- 33: Haress – Ghosts
- 34: Kali Malone – Living Torch
- 35: Osheyack – Intimate Publics
- 36: Shit And Shine – Phase Corrected
- 37: Alison Cotton – The Portrait You Painted Of Me
- 38: Loop – Sonancy
- 39: ABADIR – Mutate
- 40: Porridge Radio – Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky
- 41: Kramer – Music For Films Edited By Moths
- 42: Gnod – Hexen Valley
- 43: Eric Chenaux – Say Laura
- 44: FKA twigs – CAPRISONGS
- 45: Working Men’s Club – Fear Fear
- 46: Wu-Lu – LOGGERHEAD
- 47: Lala &ce, Low Jack – Baiser Mortel
- 48: Rigorous Institution – Cainsmarsh
- 49: Sofie Birch & Antonina Nowacka – Languoria
- 50: Kelly Lee Owens – LP.8
- 51: Pontiac Streator – Sone Glo
- 52: Pimpon – Pozdrawiam
- 53: Mitski – Laurel Hell
- 54: Nik Void – Bucked Up Space
- 55: Wojciech Rusin – Syphon
- 56: Shygirl – Nymph
- 57: WEAK SIGNAL – WAR&WAR
- 58: Sam Slater – I Do Not Wish To Be Known As A Vandal
- 59: Blind Eye – Decomposed
- 60: Somaticae – Kleis
- 61: Fontaines D.C. – Skinty Fia
- 62: Carl Stone – We Jazz Reworks Vol. 2
- 63: Aldous Harding – Warm Chris
- 64: CANDELABRUM – Nocturnal Trance
- 65: Omertà – Collection Particulière
- 66: Beyoncé – Renaissance
- 67: Julmud جُلْمود – Tuqoos | طُقُوس
- 68: Immanuel Wilkins – The 7th Hand
- 69: Carmen Villain – Only Love From Now On
- 70: Laura Cannell – Antiphony Of The Trees
- 71: Rosalía – MOTOMAMI
- 72: Saba – Few Good Things
- 73: Ethel Cain – Preacher’s Daughter
- 74: Pink Mountaintops – Peacock Pools
- 75: Silvia Tarozzi & Deborah Walker – Canti di guerra, di lavoro e d’amore
- 76: Ani Klang – Ani Klang
- 77: Erupt – Left To Rot
- 78: Kode9 – Escapology
- 79: Death’s Dynamic Shroud – Darklife
- 80: Blut Aus Nord – Disharmonium – Undreamable Abysses
- 81: Huerco S. – Plonk
- 82: Manja Ristić – Him, Fast Sleeping, Soon He Found In Labyrinth Of Many A Round, Self-Rolled
- 83: Hudson Mohawke – Cry Sugar
- 84: Nikolaienko – Nostalgia Por Mesozóica
- 85: Emmanuelle Parrenin – Targala, la maison qui n’en est pas une
- 86: Rob Mazurek Quartet – Father’s Wing
- 87: Iceboy Violet – The Vanity Project
- 88: Matmos – Regards / Ukłony dla Bogusław Schaeffer
- 89: Staraya Derevnya – Boulder Blues
- 90: Loraine James – Building Something Beautiful For Me
- 91: black midi – Hellfire
- 92: Maylee Todd – Maloo
- 93: Gi Gi – Sunchoke
- 94: 50 Foot Wave – Black Pearl
- 95: Nwando Ebizie – The Swan
- 96: Dale Cornish – Traditional Music Of South London
- 97: Cheri Knight – American Rituals
- 98: Cheb Terro Vs DJ Die Soon – Cheb Terro Vs DJ Die Soon
- 99: Digga D – Noughty By Nature
- 100: Autopsy – Morbidity Triumphant