Top 100 Music Albums of 2022 by 
Arthurknight 
2022 was a really pleasant year for music. I think that sense of post-Covid energy shines through a lot of the albums that have come out and I for one like this as a nice change from the trend of bored artists making boring lockdown recordings which were continually dolled out as low-stakes releases throughout 2020 and 2021. Musically, the 2020s continue to not be particularly radical – nobodies making anything daringly "new" – but I think a set of sounds that distinguish the decade are beginning to emerge: It's the return of softcore, the "rock band", the concept album, and political music being cool again. Meanwhile, Tiktok looms over us all as the cultural behemoth which will eventually consume the entire industry and convert all artists into short-form vloggers peddling portable smoothie blenders.
Top 15 Songs of 2022:
1. Black Country, New Road: The Place Where He Inserted The Blade
2. Bluetile Lounge: Easterly
3. Blackwinterwells, 8485: halo3
4. Yo La Tengo – Fallout
5. Rachika Nayar, Maria BC – Heaven Comes Crashing
6. julie: pg. 4 a picture of three hedges
7. Kendrick Lamar - The Heart, Part 5
8. Horsegirl: Anti-glory
9. Julia Holter: Heloise
10. Uboa, vi a: Dead Time's Broken Arrow
11. Saya Gray: If There's No Seat In the Sky (Will You Forgive Me???)
12. Sons Of: A Yellow Robe
13. Enablers: Year Of The Dog
14. Jessie Ware: Free Yourself
15. Oiseaux-Tempête: A Man Alone - In A One Man Poem
Additional "Significant" reviews (Written reviews in album comments):
Ethel Cain – Preacher's Daughter: 6
Belle and Sebastian – A Bit of Previous: 6
Sault – Air: 6
Soul Glo – Diaspora Problems: 6
Nouns – While of Unsound Mind: 6
Desire – Escape: 6
Pusha T – It's Almost Dry: 6
Wet Leg – Wet Leg: 6
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Omnium Gatherum: 6
Pinegrove – 1111: 6
FKA Twigs – Caprisongs: 6
Leikeli47 – Shape Up: 6
Earl Sweatshirt – Sick!: 6
Yard Act – The Overload: 5.5
Father John Misty – Chloë And The Next 20th Century: 5.5
Soccer Mommy – Sometimes, Forever: 5.5
Melody's Echo Chamber – Emotional Eternal: 5.5
Black Star – No Fear of Time: 5.5
Soccer Mommy – Somtimes, Forever: 5.5
The Weeknd – Dawn FM: 5
Spoon – Lucifer On The Sofa: 5
Jack White – Fear Of The Dawn: 5
Everything Everything – Raw Data Feel: 4.5
070 Shake – You Can't Kill Me: 4
Arcade Fire – We: 4
Arctic Monkeys – The Car: 2
Unsurprisingly, Muse released the year's worst album: a crass and masturbatory exercise in fantasised hubris masquerading as music. Will Of The People is the closest Muse have got to creating music that can work like the "Killer Joke" from Monty Python's Flying Circus, and after listening to it I could only wish that they had succeeded. Solid attempts at releasing worse music this year were made by Drake, Jack Harlow, and most-daringly Avril Lavigne, but it's hard to actively criticise the sausage factory for the junk it pumps out. Instead, Muse claim to be making art.
- Chart updated: 02/02/2024 04:15
- (Created: 02/07/2022 05:58).
- Chart size: 100 albums.
There are 3 comments for this chart from BestEverAlbums.com members and Top 100 Music Albums of 2022 has an average rating of 90 out of 100 (from 4 votes). Please log in or register to leave a comment or assign a rating.
View the complete list of 53,000 charts on BestEverAlbums.com from The Charts page.
Buy album 
- #Sponsored
6.5/10
Just Mustard remains a deeply amateurish act and wears their influences on their sleeves, but Heart Under has plenty of redeeming moments, good hooks, nice atmospheres, and songs that stand on their own feet. It has no staying power, just as most 21st century shoegaze bands have gone, but it's fun for what it is.
_ [First added to this chart: 06/16/2022]
Just Mustard remains a deeply amateurish act and wears their influences on their sleeves, but Heart Under has plenty of redeeming moments, good hooks, nice atmospheres, and songs that stand on their own feet. It has no staying power, just as most 21st century shoegaze bands have gone, but it's fun for what it is.
_ [First added to this chart: 06/16/2022]
2
Buy album
- #Sponsored
6.5/10
Isn't it Lovely, Loose, and Lullaby are great tracks where Ives has consolidated the best bits of 2nd and accessed better production. The intervening midsection of the album is just fine, it's not really doing anything interesting and i've forgotten about how the songs go at all even as I write this review immediately after listening to it.
_ [First added to this chart: 06/13/2022]
Isn't it Lovely, Loose, and Lullaby are great tracks where Ives has consolidated the best bits of 2nd and accessed better production. The intervening midsection of the album is just fine, it's not really doing anything interesting and i've forgotten about how the songs go at all even as I write this review immediately after listening to it.
_ [First added to this chart: 06/13/2022]
Buy album
- #Sponsored
6.5/10
Okay so when Fleshwater, a Vein.fm post-hardcore/alternative metal side project, dropped "demo" I was ecstatic. The demo version of "Linda Claire" sounded like the perfect merge of 90s hardcore and late 2010s indie female vocals. With enough DIY muddiness in the mix that it sounded unique and compelling, the 7 minute 3-song release was a sign of real potential. However, We're Not Here To Be Loved strips all that away and instead gives us exceedingly clean sterile mixes, demonstrating that Fleshwater is a band with great technical competency over the genre but no aesthetic taste whatsoever – "demo" was a fluke. The Razor's Apple is still an alright song, and there's nice moments like in the short Kiss the Ladder, but there's nothing else here really worthwhile.
_ [First added to this chart: 11/16/2022]
Okay so when Fleshwater, a Vein.fm post-hardcore/alternative metal side project, dropped "demo" I was ecstatic. The demo version of "Linda Claire" sounded like the perfect merge of 90s hardcore and late 2010s indie female vocals. With enough DIY muddiness in the mix that it sounded unique and compelling, the 7 minute 3-song release was a sign of real potential. However, We're Not Here To Be Loved strips all that away and instead gives us exceedingly clean sterile mixes, demonstrating that Fleshwater is a band with great technical competency over the genre but no aesthetic taste whatsoever – "demo" was a fluke. The Razor's Apple is still an alright song, and there's nice moments like in the short Kiss the Ladder, but there's nothing else here really worthwhile.
_ [First added to this chart: 11/16/2022]
Buy album
- #Sponsored
6.5/10
Built to Spill didn't need to release more music, but i mean who can complain that they did? It's not a cynical attempt to gauge the name recognition for money or something, but on the flip side it does sound like the band have nothing left to really produce. However, if you want to quickly extract what's good here: the first and last tracks, take those, leave the rest -- they alone render this good enough for a 6.5.
_ [First added to this chart: 09/18/2022]
Built to Spill didn't need to release more music, but i mean who can complain that they did? It's not a cynical attempt to gauge the name recognition for money or something, but on the flip side it does sound like the band have nothing left to really produce. However, if you want to quickly extract what's good here: the first and last tracks, take those, leave the rest -- they alone render this good enough for a 6.5.
_ [First added to this chart: 09/18/2022]
Buy album
- #Sponsored
6.5/10
I can't listen to a whole Hatchie album – I've now learnt. However, I can appreciate it from a distance even as it just makes me want to listen to actual shoegaze. This Enchanted is the next "Sure."
_ [First added to this chart: 05/05/2022]
I can't listen to a whole Hatchie album – I've now learnt. However, I can appreciate it from a distance even as it just makes me want to listen to actual shoegaze. This Enchanted is the next "Sure."
_ [First added to this chart: 05/05/2022]
Buy album
- #Sponsored
6.5/10
Pretty cool project, an even spookier follow-up to Jade. Does it hold my attention much beyond a bit of fun sound design moments, not really.
_ [First added to this chart: 02/09/2022]
Pretty cool project, an even spookier follow-up to Jade. Does it hold my attention much beyond a bit of fun sound design moments, not really.
_ [First added to this chart: 02/09/2022]
Buy album
- #Sponsored
6.5/10
A very bare-bones project from The Oh Sees which is energetic and alive, albeit quite predictable. Probably gonna be fun live in Feb 2023.
_ [First added to this chart: 11/24/2022]
A very bare-bones project from The Oh Sees which is energetic and alive, albeit quite predictable. Probably gonna be fun live in Feb 2023.
_ [First added to this chart: 11/24/2022]
Buy album
- #Sponsored
6.5/10
Sobs have put together a fun ditty of an album. Burn Book is in particular a good track, but nothing here is excellent It's safe, but safe is okay.
_ [First added to this chart: 11/16/2022]
Sobs have put together a fun ditty of an album. Burn Book is in particular a good track, but nothing here is excellent It's safe, but safe is okay.
_ [First added to this chart: 11/16/2022]
Buy album
- #Sponsored
6/10
Just a bit of solo female vocals on piano. Don't want to sound dismissive of that, but you do really need to be very good at the fundamentals and have the tightest recording parameters for it to work. Tamara gets kinda close to making this a reality on "Endless Time" where the Canadian channels Joni Mitchell but to no real end result.
_ [First added to this chart: 05/18/2022]
Just a bit of solo female vocals on piano. Don't want to sound dismissive of that, but you do really need to be very good at the fundamentals and have the tightest recording parameters for it to work. Tamara gets kinda close to making this a reality on "Endless Time" where the Canadian channels Joni Mitchell but to no real end result.
_ [First added to this chart: 05/18/2022]
Buy album
- #Sponsored
6/10
So my copy of Peasant on vinyl arrived the other day, it's pretty cool – I really like Dawson and it's nice to have a slice of him in my collection. This one ain't getting in though, it's his weakest project in a while. The whole trilogy idea was always a pretty stale threadbare linking of his projects, but it would be justified if The Ruby Cord – as the first two in their own respects accomplish admirably – offered a meaningful commentary about humanity's prospects and what that means for us now. Oddly, despite Dawson's characteristically shrewd and perspicacious social observations, it doesn't whatsoever. Or, if it does I have not been able to extract it with the same didactic ease with which Peasant and 2020 provide; this album loses itself in abstraction. It seems that Dawson didn't have anything trenchant to say about the 26th century after-all.
The essential quality of 2017's Peasant is that the "community" is insular, founded on xenophobia, and resistant to the encroachment of the stranger. The hypothetical bard is thus traversing through this social landscape "in search of the Holy Grail of human decency." In 2020, people share the same spaces (they are all still British; they are neighbours), but there is no more "community." Dawson talks about class stratification, manufactured consent, and the lingering shadows of empire, but it is a guttural experience of alienation that plagues the album: "I know I must be paranoid / But I feel the atmosphere / 'Round here is growing nastier / People don't care anymore."
As 500 years from now will prove – in Dawson's mind – there will never come a techno-utopia for humanity. Instead, if I am to force it into some narrative continuity with these two prior projects – as Dawson wants us to do – the slow death of community will reach a natural conclusion and those who still linger will be rendered truly and literally alone: Hermits in a dying land approaching extinction. It's an almost Fisher King-esque tale, but calling it that would only imply that there is a better album about a 26th century Fisher King dystopia where our wounded spirituality, atrophied community and racist demons manifest a literal T. S. Elliot wasteland, this time of a distant post-post-modernity.
Despite spots of intriguing musicality, nice production and an otherwise not unpleasant listening experience, this is conceptually bankrupt.
_ [First added to this chart: 11/24/2022]
So my copy of Peasant on vinyl arrived the other day, it's pretty cool – I really like Dawson and it's nice to have a slice of him in my collection. This one ain't getting in though, it's his weakest project in a while. The whole trilogy idea was always a pretty stale threadbare linking of his projects, but it would be justified if The Ruby Cord – as the first two in their own respects accomplish admirably – offered a meaningful commentary about humanity's prospects and what that means for us now. Oddly, despite Dawson's characteristically shrewd and perspicacious social observations, it doesn't whatsoever. Or, if it does I have not been able to extract it with the same didactic ease with which Peasant and 2020 provide; this album loses itself in abstraction. It seems that Dawson didn't have anything trenchant to say about the 26th century after-all.
The essential quality of 2017's Peasant is that the "community" is insular, founded on xenophobia, and resistant to the encroachment of the stranger. The hypothetical bard is thus traversing through this social landscape "in search of the Holy Grail of human decency." In 2020, people share the same spaces (they are all still British; they are neighbours), but there is no more "community." Dawson talks about class stratification, manufactured consent, and the lingering shadows of empire, but it is a guttural experience of alienation that plagues the album: "I know I must be paranoid / But I feel the atmosphere / 'Round here is growing nastier / People don't care anymore."
As 500 years from now will prove – in Dawson's mind – there will never come a techno-utopia for humanity. Instead, if I am to force it into some narrative continuity with these two prior projects – as Dawson wants us to do – the slow death of community will reach a natural conclusion and those who still linger will be rendered truly and literally alone: Hermits in a dying land approaching extinction. It's an almost Fisher King-esque tale, but calling it that would only imply that there is a better album about a 26th century Fisher King dystopia where our wounded spirituality, atrophied community and racist demons manifest a literal T. S. Elliot wasteland, this time of a distant post-post-modernity.
Despite spots of intriguing musicality, nice production and an otherwise not unpleasant listening experience, this is conceptually bankrupt.
_ [First added to this chart: 11/24/2022]
Total albums: 100. Page 10 of 10
Don't agree with this chart? Create your own from the My Charts page!
Top 100 Music Albums of 2022 composition
| Artist | Albums | % | |
|---|---|---|---|
 |
 |
|
|
| Just Mustard | 1 | 1% | |
| Congotronics International | 1 | 1% | |
| Kali Malone | 1 | 1% | |
| Destroyer | 1 | 1% | |
| Porridge Radio | 1 | 1% | |
| Oso Oso | 1 | 1% | |
| Foxtails | 1 | 1% | |
| Show all | |||
| Country | Albums | % | |
|---|---|---|---|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
45 | 45% | |
 |
20 | 20% | |
 |
6 | 6% | |
 |
4 | 4% | |
 |
3 | 3% | |
 |
3 | 3% | |
| |
2 | 2% | |
| Show all | |||
Top 100 Music Albums of 2022 chart changes
| Biggest climbers |
|---|
 Up 1 from 99th to 98thAir Guitar by Sobs |
| Biggest fallers |
|---|
| Down 1 from 98th to 99th How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars by The Weather Station |
Top 100 Music Albums of 2022 similarity to your chart(s)
Not a member? Registering is quick, easy and FREE!
Why register?
Join a passionate community of over 50,000 music fans.- Create & share your own charts.
- Have your say in the overall rankings.
- Post comments in the forums and vote on polls.
- Comment on or rate any album, artist, track or chart.
- Discover new music & improve your music collection.
- Customise the overall chart using a variety of different filters & metrics.
- Create a wishlist of albums.
- Help maintain the BEA database.
- Earn member points and gain access to increasing levels of functionality!
- ... And lots more!
Register now - it only takes a moment!
Other year charts (from the 2020s) by Arthurknight
Top 15 Music Albums of 2024 by Arthurknight (2024)Top 100 Music Albums of 2023 by
Arthurknight (2024)Top 100 Music Albums of 2021 by
Arthurknight (2023)Top 100 Music Albums of 2020 by
Arthurknight (2024)Top 100 Music Albums of 2022 ratings
90/100 (from 4 votes)
where:
av = trimmed mean average rating an item has currently received.
n = number of ratings an item has currently received.
m = minimum number of ratings required for an item to appear in a 'top-rated' chart (currently 10).
AV = the site mean average rating.
N.B. The average rating for this chart will not be reliable as it has been rated very few times.
Showing all 4 ratings for this chart.
| Rating | Date updated | Member | Chart ratings | Avg. chart rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 100/100  | 07/24/2022 13:50 |  ForegroundNoise | | 87/100 |
| 100/100 | 07/16/2022 22:16 |  travelful | | 99/100 |
| 95/100 | 07/10/2022 20:39 |  ghosttomost | | 85/100 |
| 100/100 | 02/09/2022 19:47 | DJENNY | | 100/100 |
Please log in or register if you want to be able to leave a rating
Top 100 Music Albums of 2022 favourites
Showing all 1 members who have added this chart as a favourite
Top 100 Music Albums of 2022 comments
Showing all 3 comments |
Most Helpful First | Newest First | Maximum Rated First |
Longest Comments First
(Only showing comments with -2 votes or higher. You can alter this threshold from your profile page. Manage Profile)
From 
cestuneblague 01/07/2023 01:55
cestuneblague 01/07/2023 01:55
Great chart and love all the reviews- keep it coming!
Helpful? (Log in to vote) | +1 votes (1 helpful | 0 unhelpful)
100/100
From ForegroundNoise 01/05/2023 12:39
ForegroundNoise 01/05/2023 12:39
Went to give this a 100/100 and praise your writing when I noticed I'd got there already! Interested to hear your thoughts on my own top 20 – got a piece on Ants From Up There coming out soon too
Helpful? (Log in to vote) | 0 votes (0 helpful | 0 unhelpful)
100/100
From ForegroundNoise 07/24/2022 13:51
ForegroundNoise 07/24/2022 13:51
Another class year chart!! Genuinely a better standard of journalism than most 'Best of 2022 So Far' lists I've seen from major publications; looking forward to checking back on what it looks like in December!
Helpful? (Log in to vote) | +1 votes (1 helpful | 0 unhelpful)
Please log in or register if you want to be able to add a comment
Your feedback for Top 100 Music Albums of 2022
Let us know what you think of this chart by adding a comment or assigning a rating below!
If you enjoy our site, please consider supporting us by sparing a few seconds to disable your ad blocker.
A lot of hard work happens in the background to keep BEA running, and it's especially difficult to do this when we can't pay our hosting fees :(
We work very hard to ensure our site is as fast (and FREE!) as possible, and we respect your privacy.
A lot of hard work happens in the background to keep BEA running, and it's especially difficult to do this when we can't pay our hosting fees :(
We work very hard to ensure our site is as fast (and FREE!) as possible, and we respect your privacy.