Halfway Between Asleep and Up All Night - Albums in 2022
I did a lot of writing in 2022, and a lot of it as one might anticipate, was about music. And of all the music writing I did this year—reflections on albums celebrating milestone anniversaries, EPs, a single song in one specific case—I wrote about 25 new albums. This, of course, does not mean that I only listened to 25 new releases this year.
These lists are both fun, and not, to put together as the year comes to an end. Fun in the sense that I get to revisit all of the things that moved me in some way during the year and listen to them with as fresh of ears as I can and determine if it moved me enough to be called the 'best' or my 'favorite' of the year. But this is often a labor intensive and at times a daunting or intimidating task that I create for myself, and writing a short reflection on an album that I, in many cases, had already written a much, much longer reflection on, seems like it shouldn't be difficult, or frustrating to do, but often is.
Self Help - Future Teens
The Future Teens, at least in the past, know their way around heartbreak. The group’s debut full-length was titled Hard Feelings, and its follow-up was named Breakup Season—and on last year’s Deliberately Alive EP, even with a noticeable shift in the thematic elements of the lyricism, they were still exploring what happens when a romantic relationship comes to an end in the downcast and twangy “Bizarre Affection.”
There are easy ways, or at least a lot less complicated ways, to describe Future Teens’ sound, as well as their fearless and unrelenting third full-length, Self Help. Does referring to the group as “emo music for adults” sell them short, or does it get enough of the point across—guitar-driven, melodic power pop with lyrics that are often bleak or sad, but dressed up enough through infectious arranging that you don’t realize quite how bleak or how sad until much, much later.
And does calling Self Help, in the end, a breakup album, undercut its complexities—because, unlike its predecessors, it is not an album about the breakup with another person.
It is about breaking up with yourself.
And there is the trust in how to delicately, yet honestly, handle heavy subject matter in the songwriting process between two people, but there is also the trust the band is placing in whoever is listening to the record—that they will come along for the journey, regardless of how difficult, at times, it might be to hear.
Self Help is more or less an even split between Radin and Hoffman in terms of how many tunes each of them respectively takes the lead on—with Radin’s contributions going into vivid detail about his long standing difficulties with self-acceptance—“Sometimes life feels like being on a late night drive where someone’s taken the exit signs,” he sings in the bridge on the shimmering and jangly “Good Reason”—“Replaced your headlamps with flashlights and you’re just trying to get somewhere and not die.” That difficulty with self-acceptance and working through your own anxieties, then made more challenging by the initial onset of the pandemic, serves as the backdrop for the album’s smoldering centerpiece, “Stress Dream,” where those anxieties from day-to-day living, the feeling of malaise, and the inability to stop yourself from over-functioning collide in the portrait that Radin paints: “I can’t be thinking of how my life used to,” he concedes at the end of the song. “Measuring my worth in daylight hours, I use. ‘Cause suddenly it’s dark, and there’s so much left to do.”
Self Help, as you might have surmised by the title alone, is an extremely personal record in its songwriting—and there is a higher stakes immediacy within how confessional Hoffman is, as they detail their struggles with sobriety, often in graphic depictions where you can feel the frustration and desperation with which the song was written from the bottom of. “I’m sipping on a scotch I hate—my reward for getting through today,” they howl in the punchy chorus to “Well Enough. “I did nothing but skip another meal and walk around a Target.” Then later, at the end of the album’s first side, on “B.Y.O.B.,” which stands for myriad things, including “bring your old bull shit” and “be your own burden,” Hoffman becomes even more visceral in the description of the depths they had fallen to and the seemingly insurmountable task of pulling themselves out: “How long have I been at the bottom?,” they ask, with the response arriving as, “Feeling best when I feel nothing.”
A tightly knit cycle of songs, the tone is set on Self Help within its first track, which is truthfully its finest moment as well as one of the most resonant songs the band has put together so far. Hoffman takes the lead on the stark, slow-building “Doorknob Confessional,” which continues to grow in urgency until it explodes in a beautiful, slow-motion release that pushes back hard against the idea of anyone who is dismissive toward somebody struggling with mental health. “Whoever said ‘Just get some exercise,’ has clearly never, ever tried to claw their way out of their own damn body, planned a route to their own exit sign, barely held onto their next appointment, couldn’t eat, and went to bed for dinner, spent a holiday weekend in borrowed clothes and those socks that help you grip the floor—they’ve never been halfway between asleep and up all night.”
It isn’t exactly easy hearing some of these songs, but if you are like me, and perhaps in some respects, you might be, then for as difficult as it might be to hear songs about depression, anxiety, self-loathing, and alcoholism, you may know that it is sometimes not exactly easy just simply making it through the day in one piece, which is why an album like Self Help is such an important record in how it handles these themes with humility and grace.
There is a space that exists between a cry for help and asking for help—both are a difficult, humbling admission to make, and within that seemingly dark space, Future Teens have made an an album that meets you where you are and, if anything else, offers an assurance that regardless of it is a cry, or if it is an ask, there is nothing wrong with needing help.
Running With The Hurricane - Camp Cope
And there is, of course, the charm of when a singer really leans into—and perhaps they are simply not able to play against it—the accent of their homeland. The muddled and heavy rolls of James Graham’s thick Scottish dialect, coursing through the disorienting and chaotic arranging of the first two albums from his group The Twilight Sad, contributed to what made the band so initially compelling. And it is, at least in part, what makes Camp Cope’s Running With The Hurricane so fascinating and unique—the long, Australian drawl of vocalist Georgia McDonald, and how it is almost always present but is very, very apparent on certain words or within certain phrases.
There is an undeniable beautiful ferocity to Running With The Hurricane—the trio’s third full-length. Inherently less brash and exponentially more melodic than their previous efforts, there are still moments when it seems like the group wants to absolutely explode, but they have learned, over the last few years, to use restraint, and that, as McDonald explained in an interview before the album’s release, her anger doesn’t own or control her anymore the way it once might have—a philosophy to apply to one’s personal life, yes, but it also creates a shift in how the band sounds, and the kind of songs they are writing, asking them to be more creative and thoughtful in how they work through any kind of angst.
McDonald describes herself, at least twice, as being “on fire”; she references the sky, often, as turning gold; she is both unflinching but also perhaps a little bashful about how she discusses casual sex; and she is the first to admit that she needs attention in how she describes herself as a “double texter” in two different places on Running With The Hurricane—within the album’s first half on the strummy, bouncing “Blue,” where she opens with the breathless, self-effacing line, “Phone in my hand—still checking if you called. I’m double texting. No, I’ve never been cool. And I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it—yeah, I’m on fire.”
Then, again, in the second half of the record, on the soaring, slow-burning “Jealous,” she admits, “I want your attention—still double texting like I’ve got nothing left to lose.”
For a majority of the year, following the release of Running With The Hurricane, I focused solely on the album’s stunning closing track, “Sing Your Heart Out,” and eventually, the sentiment of the song—“People change, give them time—if you can change, then so can I,” played a large role in me finally understanding and inevitably accepting that yes, people change, but that change is not an end, and that, as McDonald sings in the short bridge that takes the song from its gorgeous, bittersweet first half into the visceral scream into the abyss that it ends with, that there are so many different kinds of love, and that when you do love someone—regardless of it is romantic or platonic, that you love them not for who they were, in the past, or whom you have perhaps erroneously though they were, but for who they are.
But in focusing so much on that song and those themes, I forgot about the unabashed optimism and hope found within the twangy and ramshackle-sounding titular track.
In how self-referential some of the songwriting is on Running With The Hurricane, McDonald’s songwriting is often self-deprecating as well, and on “Running With The Hurricane,” she concedes early on that she compares the best parts of someone else to the worst parts of herself, before saying, “If this is the bottom, I can show you around.” But the discovery and reversal come within the second half of the song where she comes to the conclusion, and believes in it with every fiber of her being, that the only way out is up.
And there is something so powerful in the moment of that realization, with the thick, resonant bass lines from Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich rippling up to the top of the song’s mix, the bashed-out, clattering percussion from drummer Sarah Thompson, with McDonald’s howling vocals rising to the top of it all, that regardless of how pessimistic or hopeless you may regularly find yourself, you want to believe in what she is telling you too.
Running With The Hurricane is full of powerful, and at times, seemingly infinite feeling moments like that, though—places where the music and the vocals come together and ascend to towering heights, with the album then taking you to an absolutely unforgettable place of devastating observations and staggering beauty.
The Sun Still Seems to Move - Shannen Moser
“It’s ass-to-ass traffic sometimes, yelling on the freeway. I love you on a Friday night, and I finally feel free—Oh My God.”
This time, last year, seems so far away—feeling, to me anyway, like a lot more time than just a single calendar year has passed, but it would have been around this time, last year, or shortly thereafter, at the beginning of 2022, when I came across the Philadelphia-based singer and songwriter Shannen Moser.
As part of the tightly knit independent scene in the city, Moser had digitally self-released some of their earliest material, then released two full-length albums—Oh, My Heart, from 2017, and I’ll Sing, released the following year. Long gestating and laborious (you can hear it in how intricate a number of the arrangements are), Moser released their third full-length, The Sun Still Seems to Move, this autumn—robust, fragile, honest, sweeping, intelligent, and poignant, I often wonder if this is a sentiment I overuse when describing an album, but Moser has created something that is truly a definitive statement of beauty.
The Sun Still Seems to Move is an album that is steeped in a deep folk tradition and sound—and for as gorgeous as it can be as it unfolds across 11 tracks, it opens with a surprising rootsy dissonance on “Paint by Number,” with the bow cutting across the strings of the cello, creating a dizzying, swirling feeling that eventually gives way to a kind of gentle twinkling—then, by the time it reaches the chorus—something grand and lush in sound. And within that dedication to the more traditional, rustic “folk” sound, the inclusion of violin, viola, and banjo throughout The Sun Still Seems to Move, with songs often favoring or finding their way into a bouncier or slightly rollicking style of arrangement that effortlessly creates a very warm, welcoming sensation.
And the idea of being “welcomed” is both figurative and quite literal in many cases across the album.
The instrumentation is, of course, impressive in the way layers of strings, guitars, banjos, piano, and minimal synths are woven together to create something organic and intimate sounding, but Moser’s lyricism, and the kind of vivid, literate narratives they create, is what makes The Sun as astounding of an album as it is.
And then even later, on the album’s second side, and in one of its most devastating songs, “Liminal,” “It’s the first good day of Fall—I have a plan,” Moser explains to an off-stage character. “Spend some money at the store, and make a bread. Use my Hanas and wrestle it ’til it’s ready—something I don’t think I could ever be.”
The singles released in advance of the album’s arrival, like “Paint by Number” and “Oh My God,” are impressive, yes—able to stand alone but also working within the context of the album to ease you into the kind of intimate atmosphere that Moser has crafted, but it is “Liminal,” and the song that precedes it, “Foul Ball,” that find Moser crafting the finest written in terms of their lyricism—both are extremely personal in the details that are provided, but are draped in enough poetic ambiguity that who these songs are about, and what occurs in the world outside of the song—and after the song ends—goes unresolved.
One of the more somber, or at the very least, more wistful sounding songs on The Sun Still Seems to Move, “Foul Ball,” depicts, as much as Moser is willing to share, a health scare, and the way that the song’s protagonist, and their romantic partner, attempt to navigate it together—“The world’s best ever game of catch from our side, then my side of the bed,” Moser recalls. “What an excellent way to take a vitamin—I lost the game every time.” Though, regardless of the health issues that are depicted, it is the way that Moser turns their phrases regarding the presumed dissolution of the relationship, and the sense of loss and regret that have taken its place, that lingers well after the song has come to an end: “Cleaning out the old house,” they sing with a fragility in their voice. “Ain’t it funny how that worked out? Find a vitamin in the sock drawer like a foul ball hovering home plate—no one’s playing that game.”
Moser carries that kind of longing for what once was, but no longer is, into “Liminal”—at first, there is less of a somber edge to their writing, but the further into the song you get, the more you understand the heartbreak that is hiding just underneath. “I call you on the phone, it’s nice to hear ya,” the song begins. “I never make the effort—I know, you know. It’s so hard to do a simple thing when you’re hurting. It feels good to say, ‘I’ll see you later on,’” though, in the first verse’s final line, Moser plays their hand—“Fuck up and say, ‘I’ll see you back at home.’”
By the final moments of “Liminal,” the difficulties of self-preservation in the wake of a relationship’s demise are very apparent—“I miss you more today, tomorrow, and lately,” Moser confesses. “I’m beginning to forget most everything but time will raise its hand eventually. Would you be a friend and ride this one out with me?”
The Sun Still Seems to Move is never intimidating in how it approaches these songs, even with how layered and complex Moser’s arrangements are—and even if a song depicts heartbreak, or loss, or just a beautiful, fragmented, and passing moment that you want to hold onto for just a second longer, there is an accessibility, and at times even an infectiousness to the songs are structured.
A tender, regularly thoughtful meditation on the bonds we form with one another—how hard it can be to maintain them but how fulfilling it is when we do so. And Moser manages to do it with grace, humility, and a sense of humor when one is needed, like the jubilant, memorable burst from “Oh My God”—“Waiting for a pillar moment to say anything at all,” they explain in the song’s opening verse. “It’s ass-to-ass traffic sometimes, yelling on the freeway. I love you on a Friday night, and I finally feel free—Oh My God!”
With The Sun Still Seems to Move, Moser has created an almost flawless album that brings us along for their highs, lows, everything in between, and within those moments, stuck in traffic, we are given permission to also, if we can, feel a small sense of freedom.
S/T - Muna
When I am writing about music, I find more and more that I am writing about the idea of a convergence, or of a fine line—the line that exists between two extremes that an artist is careful to tread, or the convergence of when two distinct things begin a slow collision into one another, and the wholly unique thing that forms in between. And what I have found within the time I spent with the self-titled album from Muna—the trio’s first for Phoebe Bridgers’ imprint Saddest Factory, is that there is a very fine line between lust and sorrow, or of feeling horny and restless, and feeling incredibly sad, and that across the album’s 11 tracks, the group works to stay on either side of that line, but occasionally they simply cannot, and the results create a beautiful, confusing blur of emotions that, regardless of your lived experiences, often reflect the human condition in a way that continues to surprise every time.
Muna’s profile began rising last year, after initially connecting with Bridgers for the shimmering and flirtatious single “Silk Chiffon,” which, in a move that might seem audacious, is the opening track on Muna. The group, though, continues to build off of “Sink Chiffon”’s enthusiasm (a song that is still so good that, when you think you’ve maybe overplayed it or that it has worn out its welcome, the moment it begins, you realize that could never happen)—doubling down on the sapphic lust on the enormous and pulsating dance floor anthem “What I Want” which includes the blunt, iconic line in the chorus, “I wanna dance in the middle of the gay bar.”
There is a compulsion throughout Muna to move your body—the group knows how to construct a song that you are helpless against the urge to dance to, however, once you are out o the dance floor, the album often presents you with a choice: either flail around wildly, losing yourself in the darkness, surrounded by the warmth of other writhing bodies around you, or you give in to the tumult you are trying to outrun, and openly sob.
And in the choices presented on Muna, therein lies the convergence, because the third option is to entertain both.
The idea of a breakup song is nothing new in contemporary popular music, but throughout Muna, the group presents the idea of the breakup song as a means of self-preservation, or survival, which is one of the things that makes the record such an essential listen. On the slithering, glitchy, and startling (those bass drum hits, still, every time) “Runner’s High,” Muna’s lead vocalist Katie Gavin sings with an immediacy as she confesses, “Didn’t stay for the fight—honey, you should see me fly. Since I ran out on you, I’m on a runner’s high.”
Not every depiction of the dissolution of a relationship is as stark—the soaring, gorgeous, and reflective “Home by Now” takes a remorseful look at what could have been, and the clever, bombastic, and infectious “Anything But Me” uses a winking sense of humor in how it looks at the end of something—“You’re gonna say that I’m on a high horse,” Gavin smirks in the opening line. “I think my horse is regular-sized.”
Muna isn’t all just sexual tension waiting to burst or relief in the wake of a relationship’s demise—there is no relief to be found in the album’s penultimate track, “Loose Garment,” which is the album’s most inherently sad, as Gavin vividly depicts an attempt at working through the layers of sorrow we often carry with us after a breakup—“Used to wear my sadness like a choker,” she sings in the chorus. “It had me by the throat. Tonight I feel I’m draped in it, like a loose garment—I just let it flow.” And with as visceral of sadness, or remorse, as is felt from “Loose Garment,” there is an equal amount of longing in the emotionally charged closing track, “Shooting Star.”
Usually, there is one album a year that I describe as being more fun than legally allowable—for 2022, Muna is that album. Even when it begins to lose momentum slightly with a few less memorable songs in its second half, and even when it takes its most self-reflective and stirring turn in the breathtaking country-tinged ballad, “Kind of Girl,” the album is still full of moments that are absolutely fun as hell, and the group has created something unrelenting in how it walks that line between wanting to cry and wanting to fuck, then ultimately doing both in the same breath.
*
Light Moving Time - Babehoven
There is a place where a hazy ambiguity, a stark honesty, and a feeling of unease and dissonance converge—and in the center of that convergence, you will find the duo Babehoven; specifically, their debut full-length, the haunting, captivating Light Moving Time.
Across its ten tracks, the duo of Maya Bon and Ryan Alpert do not so much wear their influences on their sleeves, but rather, they channel them into something robust, complex, and wholly original in sound.
In the slow fuming opening track, “Break The Ice,” you can hear echoes of Kim Gordon in the way Bon delivers her vocals—specifically at the moment when she begins to writhe, through gritted teeth, singing, “You got sick sick sick, sick sick sick sick—I lost everything I loved”; later on in the album, in “Stand It,” and “Pockets,” the duo’s swirling and chaotic instrumentation is reminiscent of MBV-era My Bloody Valentine, simply in how Alpert and Bon manage to find a perfect balance between noise, texture, tone, and melody.
Babehoven, as a project, is one that continues to grow with each outing—musically, Alpert and Bon keep pushing themselves toward a larger, tighter sound and dynamic. And even with as memorable as some of the instrumentation and melodies are on Light Moving Time (e.g., the slow motion tumbling, rising, and falling of the first single, “I’m On Your Team”), it is really Bon’s lyricism that resonates and leaves you with a lot to sit with, and consider, well after you have reached the album’s hushed final moments.
There are specific lines, or smaller moments, like in “I’m On Your Team,” where Bon howls one of the more poignant phrases while the song builds around her: “Learning to be angry but not be mean,” which is, of course, the kind of statement we could all benefit to take into consideration, but it is the longer, and much more personal reflections, and the honesty with which Bon speaks about her own mental health that more or less attracted me to this album, to begin with, and I find that in the weeks since the release of Light Moving Time, it is those passages that I continue to ruminate on—like within the sparse and stark “Philadelphia,” where, among other poetically bleak phrases, Bon is very blunt in her writing when she says, “I’m trying to live again without wanting to kill myself.” Or, shortly thereafter, in the nervy unrest of “Do It Fast,” a similar line: “If it’s going to kill me, then it burn—just do it fucking fast because it’s starting to hurt.”
I hesitate to say that there is hope, or optimism, in Light Moving Time as it comes to a close, but there are small flashes of something that is, at least, a little less bleak when the album reaches its penultimate and arguably its finest moment, “June Phoenix,” where, over a slowly drifting rhythm and strummed acoustic guitar, Bon continues her reflection—effacing, though willing to admit there is the potential for growth, within the same line: “I know I have been a challenge in this life—I have too many teeth. I have found ways to bite.”
“I don’t know how to give,” she continues as the song's immediacy begins to slowly build around her. “When I give all I give, I get trampled. I am trying to write something funny to get a good rating this time, but I’m not funny.”
Light Moving Time, even when the pacing slows ever so slightly at the halfway mark, is an enormous, bold artistic statement from Babehoven—fearless in the face of the weighty themes it takes on, creating a head-on collision of dissonance and beauty that is so compelling you are unable to turn away.
The Loneliest Time - Carly Rae Jepsen
In the end, an album titled The Loneliest Time, perhaps, did not end up being as lonely sounding, or as much about loneliness, as some listeners (myself included) might have thought—and perhaps the album’s titular track, a sweeping, grand, and rollicking slice of disco-inspired pop, was a lot less about loneliness in its lyricism and a lot more about, in the wake of a relationship’s demise, the remorse one feels and the notion of reconciliation.
In her previous outings since reinventing herself as an indie-pop and critical darling in 2015 with Emotion, Carly Rae Jepsen, more often than not, writes from a place of longing, or want. She will take you right up to the moment when something is going to happen—specifically within a romantic context—but we, as listeners, rarely, if ever, find out what happens in the moments that follow. As uneven as it can be at times, The Loneliest Time, for its songwriting alone, was fascinating because it found Jepsen pushing herself and her lyricism further away from that place of writing about the idea of desire only. Arguably, in the past, she has been a guarded about exactly how much of herself outside of her persona she wants to reveal in her writing, but there is a lot more of Carly Rae Jepsen as a person, not just a pop persona, found within these songs.
The Loneliest Time, for as introspective as Jepsen is willing to get, is still a pop album, and Jepsen herself is still a pop performer, and the album works, and works the best, when it scales to enormous, kaleidoscopic heights, where it is allowed to dazzle, like the visceral urgency of “Talking to Yourself,” whereas the rhythm pulsates, Jepsen muses from the furthest corners of desire—the regret and possibly bitter sentiments found when a former partner has entered into a new relationship; or the shimmering bombast of the opening track, “Surrender My Heart,” where, even as personal as Jepsen gets within the lyrics, singing from within a relationship as opposed to the place where it hasn’t even begun, or it has been long since over, it is a song that, in its slow build and in the explosive arrival of the shout-a-long chorus, grabs you by the hand and pulls you out onto the dance floor.
Uneven in moments, certainly, but The Loneliest Time, as a whole, is an impressive piece of pop music, painstakingly crafted by one of the best performers within the boundaries of the genre, who encourages continual growth from her listeners through the bright and extremely thoughtful music she is making.
Special - Lizzo
Melissa Jefferson, the singer and dynamic personality we have come to know over the last few years as Lizzo opens up her second major label album (and fourth full-length overall) with a greeting, and then a question, to her listeners: “Hi motherfucker—did you miss me?,” she asks, barely able to contain the gigantic smile on her face, so big that you can hear it coming through the first few notes of “The Sign.”
And here is the thing about Special—it was not that I was surprised I enjoyed it. Jefferson’s major label debut, Cuz I Love You, as well as the ubiquitousness of her pre-Atlantic Records singles “Truth Hurts” and “Good as Hell” in 2019, played a rather large role in the final few months of that year for me, so I went into Special expecting that it would, like its predecessor, be a lot of fun.
Opening by saying, “Hi motherfucker,” is really the kind of thing that only an artist as charismatic, confident, and radiant in persona as Jefferson is could pull off, and she continues to radiate that kind of charisma and confidence the further into the album you get. Special is truly a celebratory affair—with Jefferson celebrating herself, yes, but celebratory for us, the listeners, as well, as she regularly encourages us to celebrate ourselves as we are able to.
“I’ve been home since 2020,” Jefferson sings after the opening line to “The Sign.” “I’ve been twerkin’ and makin’ smoothies—it’s called healing, and I feel better since you seen me last.” Then, later on in the song’s breathless and rollicking chorus—“If you’re lookin’ for the sign, bitch, I’m it. And I know you wanna fuck with me again.”
And there is a kind of charm to just how self-aggrandizing at times Jefferson can be, at times, throughout Special—again, it takes a certain kind of artist with a certain kind of extremely likable personality to pull it off the way she does and often as she does. “It’s bad bitch o’clock,” she coos at the beginning of the album’s first single, the smooth, disco-inspired “About Damn Time,” or the clever, “That’s my girl, we CEOs and dancin’ like we a C-E-Ho,” on one of few odes to friendships on the album, the dazzling and jubilant “Grrrls,” with the other being the fittingly titled, “I Love You, Bitch,” which Jefferson says can be about any kind of love—platonic, romantic, or familial, and features some of the first half of the album’s most memorable and even wholesome lines: “Yeah, you are the most special-est. Not just that bitch, but you, my bitch. You water all your plants and eat your veggies—I’m obsessed with it.”
Later, in Special’s second half, on the infectious and slinking “Birthday Girl,” Jefferson continues to demonstrate her ability to write a song that has a sense of humor but is still so good, and fun, that even a listener like myself is able to still take it seriously—“I started at the bottom with my hoes,” she sings in an exaggerated, emotional range. “Love y’all so fucking much. Don’t mean to get emosh, but you know me and Patrón."
Perhaps in the hands of a less capable artist, the messages of loving yourself that Jefferson interjects throughout Special would come off as insincere or overly cloying—but she is quite earnest, and that comes through in the stirring and powerful titular track where she bellows, “Fame is pretty new, but I’ve been used to people judgin’ me—that’s why I move the way I move and why I’m so in love with me. I’m used to feeling alone, so I thought that I’d let you know in case nobody told you today, you’re special.”
Even in places where it loses a little bit of momentum structurally (mostly within the second half, closer toward the end), there are no complete misfires on Special—during my first listen of the album, I remember thinking about two songs that it was a whole lot of fun; five months later, it is still just as fun, if not more so, when I return to it for subsequent listens. I do not always want to sit down with an album that radiates a reckless optimism and jubilance the way Special does, but it is an album that continues to impress in the way that Jefferson is always in your corner, believing in you, even if you are incapable of believing in yourself.
Big Time - Angel Olsen
In a a long-form interview conducted shortly before the release of Big Time, Angel Olsen discussed how, when beginning the recording process for the album, she leaned into the parts of herself that she had been “shying away from for all these years.”
And she is mostly talking about the rather large and admirable sonic shift that Big Time represents in her canonical works, but it can also be viewed as a statement on her coming out as queer a year before the album’s arrival—Olsen’s journey toward accepting her identity, the early stages of her relationship with partner Beau Thibodeaux, the passing of both of her parents, the civil unrest across the country following the murder of George Floyd, and the isolation of the pandemic all contributed to the vast scale of Big Time’s thematic elements.
And what made Big Time so compelling during my initial time with it in the early days of the summer, and what makes it so compelling still at the year comes to an end, and what will certainly carry it further, is that even when Olsen is writing, and singing about something inherently joyful (such as her relationship) there is a visceral sadness in both her voice, and often in the arranging (e.g., “Chasing The Sun,” the sweeping, harrowing closing track) that causes a lot of these songs to hang like a specter, casting a very long shadow that is still present when the record has come to an end, has been taken off the turntable, and placed back onto the shelf.
I have been assured by more than one person that there is a space where both grief and joy can co-exist, and for three years now, I have been trying to find it, but have not been able to figure out that balance. Lyrically, Olsen is writing from that place throughout the majority of Big Time, playing with a heightened sense of drama that comes along with both extremes. And as the record continues, specifically within its second half, Olsen thrives in the collision of these often densely layered arrangements, and the dreamy aesthetic that has been placed over them, building moments of restraint and moments of catharsis as she plays with the idea of tension and release, often within the same song, like within “Right Now” and “Go Home,” both of which she can build to a disorienting, cacophonic peak.
Big Time is most successful and most memorable when Olsen is exploring her grief, like in the sprawling, smoldering “This is How it Works,” where she recalls an exceptionally difficult, emotional phone exchange with her mother, though within the honest in her lyricism, there is an intentional vagueness as to who has placed the call, and who is on the receiving end of it. “I’ve never been too sad,” she begins. “So sad that I couldn’t share. When you can’t find the words, guess it’s time to listen.” Then, in the harrowing chorus, “I know you can’t talk long, but I’m barely hanging on. I’m so tired of telling you it’s a hard time again.”
With an album that reaches such theatrical, dizzying, and stirring heights the way that Big Time often does, it makes sense that Olsen would close it out with the slow-burning piano ballad “Chasing The Sun,” where, even in the adoration that she describes for a day in the life of with her partner, there is still a desperation and urgency in the way she howls the phrase “Driving away the blues.”
At times it is an album that is so warm and robust in sound that it seems like it is unfolding from a dream, though Olsen’s evocative and personal writing is the kind of thing that pulls you from that dream back into waking life—the juxtaposition of joy and grief, and a stark reminder that when you have driven away the blues, it is unfortunately often a temporary reprieve.
Surrender - Maggie Rogers
Even in the few places, it falters within its latter half, the amount of ambition packed into Maggie Rogers’ second major label outing, Surrender, is incredibly admirable.
The long-gestating product of her time spent in isolation during the first year of the pandemic, and sharing themes with the dissertation for her master's from Harvard Divinity School, Surrender, putting it simply, is an enormous and bold statement—both in the ideas, it explores within, but also in how it sounds while it is exploring.
There is a restless spirit at the heart of Surrender—and within that restlessness, rather than resisting it, or trying to tame it, the conceit of the album is the notion of giving in to that restlessness, and to a larger unknown, and letting go of any kind of fear that is holding us back from truly experiencing everything in life, the good and the bad.
Far removed from her earliest, independently released albums which were folk-oriented in sound, and even pushed a little further out from the slick, electro-infused, infectious pop of her major label debut, Heard it in A Past Life, Surrender doesn’t balk at the notion of being categorized by genre, but it, like the restless spirit within, is hard to pin down. It is noisy and bright—and perhaps its noisiest and brightest songs, “That’s Where I Am,” and “Want Want,” were released as singles ahead of the album in full, but there are other moments, specifically within the first half, where there is no shortage of voluminous bombast, like the absolutely smoldering and emotionally torrential first track, “Overdrive,” or the towering and unhinged love story of “Anywhere With You.”
Across Surrender, there are moments that are slightly more focused on the overall vibe of the song—the lyrics not so much taking a back seat in favor of the arranging, but there is less of an emphasis on one element or the other, and more concern with how the words, and the music, converge within the song. Like the restlessness that courses through its creation, and its sound, lyrically, Rogers covers a lot of ground—sometimes, sad, or full of sorrow; and in other times, there is a lusty tension that seems ready to burst. Regardless of whether or not a song ends up stumbling when it comes to its lyricism, Rogers, when she does pen something thoughtful, or poignant, really goes for it, and can put together a line that really stays with you.
“I try my best not to be bitter—give my rage a babysitter,” she sings on the slower, acoustic “Begging for Rain. “Stop waiting for the adults to come home”; or, in the dizzying penultimate track, “Symphony,” the first lyric that really caught my attention when sitting with the the record during my initial listen—“I know there’s times when I can be a lot to handle. I’m working with a therapist to take care of it. Keep coming back to me when I keep pushing you away—it’s not something I mean to do. It just comes off that way.”
Surrender, in all its dazzling and enormous ferocity, presents a moment of exhalation and for catharsis—for Rogers, yes, in her effort to live and breathe the idea of “surrender,” but for the listeners as well. And even when it reaches a place of introspection or an urgent pleading, it is still a surprisingly celebratory album—a “feral joy,” Rogers calls it, that is full of blinding flashes of optimism.
Radiator - Sadurn
I think that, as often as I returned to Radiator throughout the year after its late spring release, it continued to amaze me that it is full-length Sadurn’s debut, and that the band itself is still more or less in its infancy. Launched as a solo output for Genevieve DeGroot roughly five years ago, they added a second guitarist Jon Cox in 2019—the project then became a more traditional “band,” rounded out with bassist Tabitha Ahnert and drummer Amelia Swain in early 2020.
A majority of the songs on Radiator are what you could make an argument for calling “love songs,” though perhaps in an untraditional sense of the description—often, DeGroot is writing about a romantic relationship that has already come to a presumably tumultuous end, or at least that is how it is depicted in the album’s opening track, “Snake,” which is truly one of the best songs on the record and is one of the most memorable songs of the year in how it balances a “quiet/loud/quiet” structure in its arranging, a freewheeling kind of looseness when the band really hits their stride in the bigger, more electrified sounding moments, and the urgent sense of longing and pleading written into the lyrics. That kind of pleading, and melancholic pining is present throughout Radiator—most noticeable, or at least most resonant, in the other tunes released as singles, like the gentle, swaying “Golden Arm,” where DeGroot asks, “Be honest darling, do you think of me and all this stupid stuff? It’s been a few days since I heard from you—so do I feel the love?”
Or, at the album’s halfway point, on the jittery and explosive “Special Power,” which, overall, includes some of Radiator’s most thoughtful, or at least relatable lyrics: “I’m trying to distract myself ‘cause I’m getting tired of crying my eyes out over you, and over nothing,” they begin. Then, a few lines later, “After work, I’m fucking tired—I just want to go back to bed and spend the next day inside, but I’m still having thoughts about you.”
DeGroot, more or less working through these complicated feelings in real-time as the album unfolds, finds the most resolution they are able to in the delicate, beautiful closing track, “Icepick. “But you and I are good friends,” they explain. “Sometimes we’re in love, and it almost feels like nothing I’m ever going to find again.”
For as sparse and fragile as Radiator is, there is a surprising amount of exuberance to be found within, simply because Sadurn, as a band, is brimming with so much potential—you can hear it from beginning to end, and it is that kind of enthusiasm, tucked into the delicacies of the album, that makes it one that continues to reveal more of itself in the return listens it is more than worthy of.
A Light for Attracting Attention - The Smile
Retrospectively, as I am on the cusp of turning 40, it is easy for me to look back over the last 30 years and understand that I, perhaps, started listening to Radiohead at an age when I more than likely should have have been listening to them—the ten-year-old, stopped in his tracks by the chugging guitar that rips through “Creep”; the 12-year-old who watched, mouth agape, at the bizarre and chilling video for “Just”; or the 14-year-old who needed to be at a record store, when it opened, on the day OK Computer was released in the United States—the thing that kept me returning to the band then, in my pre-teen and teenage years, when music tastes can be extremely passing and fickle, and the thing that has kept me returning to Radiohead now, as an adult, is their ability to still regularly surprise.
The Smile, the new trio, formed by two out of the five members of Radiohead, alongside jazz percussionist Tom Skinner from the now defunct outfit Sons of Kemet, is not the first time that Radiohead’s frontman Thom Yorke has ventured out into a new project—he’s released three solo albums over the last 16 years, and in it, he early 2010s, formed the “supergroup” Atoms for Peace, featuring Red Hot Chili Peppers’ bassist Flea, and Radiohead’s longtime producer Nigel Godrich within the band’s lineup.
Founded in 2020 as a means for Yorke to continue collaborating with Radiohead’s lead guitarist, Jonny Greenwood, The Smile, on their debut full-length, A Light for Attracting Attention, musically speaking anyway, are similar enough to latter-day Radiohead (A Moon Shaped Pool, mostly) to welcome listeners in with ease, but the album, overall, is one of reinvigoration—continuing to surprise with a collection of songs that are remarkably compelling and fresh.
The slower-paced and smoldering tracks that creep along, like “The Smoke,” or that feature lush, dramatic string accompaniments, like “Pana-Vision,” are all well and good, and you can hear the similarities to Yorke’s and Greenwood’s day job in them both, but the real invigoration and surprises come from the moments of tension on the verge of being released and growing to chaotic proportions, like the wildly oscillating and jittery opening track, “The Same,” which sounds like Yorke is being drowned in an ocean of synthesizers, or the brash and snarling, punk-inspired fury of the album’s first single, “You Will Never Work in Television Again,” or A Light’s penultimate gasp, “We Don’t Know What Tomorrow Brings.”
It is, though, when the band really leans into a kind of melancholy, or a more somber sound, that creates some of the most lasting material on the album, like the tightly restrained and string ladened “Free in The Knowledge,” where Yorke, still able to push his voice into a higher register, figuratively and literally stares down his reflection in the song’s self-effacing lyrics, the whisper quiet, moody aesthetic, and shuffling rhythm of “Speech Bubbles,” or the beautiful, hypnotic, and cascading waves of “Open The Floodgates,” where a Radiohead-esque progression of chords on the piano collides with a slowly spiraling pattern of beeps and boops from an antiquated, warm sounding synthesizer.
With well over 30 years put into the group, I am uncertain what, as 2022 comes to an end, what the dynamic within the five members of Radiohead is truly like—they have been inactive since the tour in support of 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool came to an end, only reissuing landmark albums like OK Computer, Kid A, and Amnesiac for milestone anniversaries. If the band is more or less done, but has not officially split, a record like A Light for Attracting Attention and a project like The Smile shows that Yorke and Greenwood, now both in their 50s, have retained a creative working relationship that can generate something invigorating: intricate in how densely layered it is, wildly compelling to listen to from beginning to end, and still able to surprise.
Midnights - Taylor Swift
At this point in her career, the release of a new Taylor Swift album is no longer just the release of an album—it is an event, and an experience. And so it is difficult, at least at first, to separate the album itself—in this case, Midnights, from the frenzy surrounding its announcement and then the inevitability of its arrival. With no singles issued in advance, and the promotional rollout comprised of song title reveals and limited edition color vinyl variants available in her online store, what the album might sound like, up until the clock struck midnight on Friday, October 21st (or in my case, 11 p.m. on Thursday, October 20th) was subject to speculation and cloaked in mystery.
And I suppose that cloak of mystery, or a shadowy nature, ultimately makes sense with an album called Midnights, and one that is loosely tied together by the concept of sleepless nights and the memories throughout our lives that keep us awake.
Collaborating across the entirety of the album with pop auteur Jack Antonoff, with whom Swift has worked within some capacity, off and on, over the last decade, Midnights, shifts her sound away from the somber, indie-folk-inspired sound of the surprise releases of Folklore and Evermore, and and even further away from the bright, seemingly optimistic pop of 2019’s Lover. Midnights isn’t a “dark” album exactly, but but musically, it does find Swift and Antonoff pushing the boundaries as they are able, and where they are able, working within a place that seems to thrive in contrast—there is often a sparse, or minimalistic element to a number of the songs found within, especially on the first half, but even in that sparsity, there are a lot of dense layers and textures, often coming from the heavy rumbling of antiquated drum programming (like on the slithering opening track, “Lavender Haze,” and the woozy, sultry “Maroon”), a vast array of synthesizers, and of a penchant for pitch-shifting Swift’s vocals and chopping them into the rhythm of the song itself—most noticeably (and most startling upon initial listen) at the halfway point in “Midnight Rain.”
Released in three different editions, including various additional tracks recorded for the album but cut from the final 13 that turn up on the standard version of Midnights, the definitive ranking of all the songs can be a source of contention among listeners—should she have shaved a song like “Bejeweled” off of the album in favor of a song like the smoldering, dramatic “Bigger Than The Whole Sky,” or the haunting, visceral, emotional swirling of “Would’ve, Should’ve Could’ve”? Yes, but sonically neither of those, even with as impressive as they are, would have fit within the soundscape that takes shape over the album as a 13-track journey.
Midnights opens with a request, or a demand—that we meet Taylor Swift at midnight, and the time itself is referenced regularly throughout the songs included. Faltering slightly in its second half with its pacing, and full of writing that runs the spectrum of being self-effacing and poignant, to being self-aware and maintaining a sense of humor that was initially hard for me to accept (I did inevitably come to appreciate the “sexy baby” line in “Anti-Hero” given enough time), it is an album that maintains a level of pop music accessibility while still being thought-provoking and challenging in how it is presented, continuing to reveal itself a little more every time we press play on the opening track, once again meeting Swift at the time and place she’s asked us to.
I Don’t Know Who Needs to Hear This - Tomberlin
Sarah Beth Tomberlin’s second full-length album begins in a whisper, and, before it ends, climbs to a ferocious, torrential snarl—and what makes I Don’t Know Who Needs to Hear This such a thoughtful and fascinating record, both in my initial listen and in revisiting throughout the year, is how extraordinarily personal her songwriting is, and how she’s able to take those narratives and find ways to work them into those two sonic extremes.
Tomberlin, throughout the album, knows how to turn a phrase—on the gentle, tumbling second track, “Runner,” she is perhaps the most personal in her songwriting as she addresses her religious upbringing and the tumultuous relationship with her parents, specifically her father. In a fragile and exhausted voice, Tomberlin sings one of the most memorable lines on the album—and of the entire year: “I know I’m not Jesus, but Jesus, I’m trying to be enough.”
While being most direct in the single “Tap,” where Tomberlin draws the correlation between the use of social media and the balance of self-worth, it is in places where she is much more fragmented and murky in her imagery where I Don’t Know succeeds—she often writes about love, and often that love is, for whatever reason, rather difficult. It’s how she opens the album, in the hushed, simmering “Easy,” where Tomberlin uses hyper-literate writing to create a strikingly vivid portrait of the breakdown of both love, trust, and communication, between herself (presumably) and another person, but there is just enough left unsaid in an effort to make the portrait intentionally ambiguous. She uses the same approach in her depictions later on in the album’s first half, on the woozy “Unsaid”—“I don’t call you up, then I don’t have to feel down,” she explains in the song’s chorus, her voice rising and falling atop the acoustic guitar underneath. “If I don't say I miss you, then you never have to be around. And if I don’t say I love you, then you don’t have to love me.”
On the album’s closing, titular track, which almost serves as an afterward, against a bit of a whimsical, or at least less volatile or tense arrangement, sings, “I don’t know who needs to hear this: sometimes it’s good to sing your feelings. And every time I open my mouth hope that something halfway helpful falls out.” A beautiful, often unpredictable statement that offers a reflection, albeit difficult to see at times, on both the self, and how we interact with others, I Don’t Know Who Needs to Hear This is exponentially more than halfway helpful in navigating the uncomfortable feelings of the human condition.
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