Rob Sheffield’s Top 20 Albums of 2022 – Rolling Stone

What a year for music—any of my top half-dozen or so could have been Number One some other year. But these are my faves, with pop idols, guitar bangers, rap poets, disco visionaries. All these albums keep giving up new surprises for me. The double-digit years are always pivotal for music—’66, ’77, ’88, ’99 were four of the coolest music years ever. (’11 and ’55 were bangers, too. Y2K wasn’t so hot, but at least it had a kick-ass Madonna album.) 2022 felt more like Neil Young’s 22 than Taylor Swift’s, but the sick sonic minds on this list kept opening up private dream spaces. Farewell to the year of Feelin’ 22. Bring on Nobody Likes You When You’re ’23.

20. Blackpink, Born Pink 

Jisoo, Lisa, Jennie, and Rosé step out as glam queens on Born Pink—it’s the great album they’ve always had in them. The “Lovesick Girls” of K-pop are out for blood—when Rosé yells “I’m so rock & roll!” she isn’t kidding. “Pink Venom” is a perfect blast of Sunset Strip hair-metal cosplay—even the title sounds like the name of a bar band playing Poison and Motley Crue covers at the sleaziest dive in town. But the killer is “Yeah Yeah Yeah,” a guitar banger full of freestyle synth-horns and crazed hormones. The only skip is the weepy ballad, but that’s just because Blackpink sound most themselves when they swagger like they know they’re the coolest girls in the room. And they always are.

19. Pusha T, It’s Almost Dry 

So…artistic evolution. A cool idea in theory, right? But then there’s Pusha T, the Lemmy of coke rap, who keeps making great records by sticking to the same dope-game turf he locked down years ago, when he was “Grindin’” with the Clipse. King Push calls himself “cocaine’s Dr. Seuss,” and if it sounds like he’s been here before, it’s because he never left. (As he put it once, his specialty is “Nosetalgia.”) He flexes with guest shots from Kid Cudi, Jay-Z, Pharrell, his Clipse brother No Malice. But Lil Uzi Vert has the best line, in “Scrape It Off”: “Like, what the motherfuck’s a roof?”

18. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Cool It Down 

Karen O gives her soul testimony on Cool It Down, making this feel like a rock companion to the SZA album. (Which is way up on this list, obviously.) The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are the unkillable vampires from the NYC indie-sleaze Meet Me In The Bathroom era. As Nick Zinner told me in 2013. “Nobody thought we’d last long enough to make ONE album, including us.” But Karen, Nick, and Brian Chase have their own unique punk juju, and they’ve never made a less-than-amazing record. (Mosquito gets unfairly slept on, mostly because of the butt-ugly cover art, but even that one had the glam-disco banger “Despair.”) The YYYs flaunt it all over Cool It Down, dancing into the apocalypse. The show-stopper: “Blacktop,” which mixes Eno synth sex and Dylan Thomas poetry as Karen testifies, “I sang in my chains like the sea!” Twenty years from “Black Tongue” to “Blacktop”—that’s 7,300 dates with the night, and not a boring moment in the batch.

17. Momma, Household Name 

Allegra Weingarten and Etta Friedman, two best friends barely into their 20s, make a real corker of a summer guitar record with Household Name. Like so much of 2022’s coolest music, it’s the sound of young women stealing everything worth stealing from Pavement or the Breeders or Veruca Salt, but with their own heartfelt twist. The best way to start the morning this year was to hit play on Household Name and feel revved up for today like it’s a brand new adventure.

16. FKA Twigs, Caprisongs 

FKA Twigs begins Caprisongs with the sound of a cassette popping in, as she says, “Hey, I made you a mixtape.” Never a bad way for a love story to begin, even if this one is all about Twigs learning to embrace herself. When she asks, “You wanna get a bit of my mystique?” the only answer is yes.

15. Black Star, No Fear of Time

I totally get why you thought the Talib Kweli/Yasiin Bey reunion was a letdown, but as a Nineties bitch who has prayed for this album on more floors than I care to count, I do not share your dismay. (Hell, what could be more authentically Nineties than disappointing everyone? How about refusing to release it on streaming services?) The Brooklyn underground rap duo made history with Rawkus classics like “Definition,” but 25 years later, they’re trying to bring their moment forward into the future. Bey (f.k.a. Mos Def) sums it up in “No Fear of Time” when he says, “We assemble an ark and just float on.” The album ends with a sample from the late Greg Tate, one of the realest minds ever to write about music, whose obit I had to write almost exactly a year ago. Tate gives a…