My top 25ish songs of 2022 (plus 20 honorable mentions)

Dec 30, 2022

Here are my top 25 songs of 2022 with 20 bonus honorable mentions. I’ve also made Spotify and YouTube playlists. Thanks for reading, hope you find something new from here.

Honorable mentions (alphabetical)

Alvvays - “Easy On Your Own?”

I keep coming back for the end of the bridge, when Molly Rankin spins and stretches the words “this time, this time,” into a whirlpool of sound, her vocals billowing like smoke in the scorching magma of guitar and drum.

Big Thief - Simulation Swarm

“Simulation Swarm” is a jewel of alliteration and imagery. I love the gentle climax of the chorus: how the band ascends slightly, like memories and feelings are swarming around Adrianne, and how you can feel her voice quiver and tighten when she says, “I wanna drop my arms and take your arms, and walk you to the shore.”

Chief Keef - The Talk (prod. Chief Keef, Chello Beats, Akachi)

I listened to 4NEM while running a few times this year, and I don’t think many stretches of music gave me a bigger adrenaline rush than the opening of “The Talk.” I remember hearing its hostile drums and bizarrely springy synth tone—like anthropomorphic metal coils strangling each other—during a long up-tempo run in the fall, just when I was about to crash from fatigue. The instant intensity electrified my drained limbs and sent me tearing through the city back home.

dazegxd - “blame” ft. Af1shawty / “emotion engine” ft. Kaiyko

While a lot of Daze’s songs hew toward some abstract feeling — a kind of deep, amorphous lovestruckness that makes you feel like a tiny atom in space yearning for an impossibly gargantuan desire — “blame” is infectiously immediate, an aural potion liable to make you fling your limbs and swing your head senselessly for three minutes. Sometimes, months after you’ve gone to a show, all you can remember from the night is a hue and a song: the way a shower of colorful beams lit everyone’s heads while “blame” bounced off the dark walls.

DJ Travella - Chapa Bakola Music Bass

This is a max-level cyclone of sonic power, unimpeded by any kind of stable structure or brief moment of aural comfort. There’s no buildup. No break in the middle. No sense-regaining comedown. Jungle, gabber, all those fast hyperactive -core offspring can bow down to this. The Tanzanian singeli DJ is a master at jamming in explosive blarps and bashes that seem like they should just trample each other but somehow cohere into a shivering symphony of club mayhem.

Gilla Band - Backwash

During live sets, the band should unleash a colony of wasps into the audience when Dara Kiely lilts “no one looks cooool.. around a wasp” and the song suddenly detonates in a fit of fiery chaos. The moshpit would be unreal.

Hook - LAnd (prod. CettiWorld)

“LAnd” opens with what feels like a hyperspeed Vertigo Effect: the background shrinking incredibly fast while the foreground is rippling toward you, suffocating you in a whirring synth. From there you’re spinning in a strangely sublime murk of voices—Hook’s sobs and screams, exasperated stammers and dejected moans—that mirrors the confused chaos of the lyrics.

iShowSpeed - FUC (prod. Syzy) / Syzy - syzy loves you!!!!!!!

Maybe the most unexpected scene-collision of the year: iShowSpeed lifted an exhilaratingly chaotic beat from Syzy (via the Jersey club mashup commune TwerkNation28, for which the dubstep producer also made this eclipse-bright squeakathon for chipmunks to twerk to). Speed made an unsanctioned flip of a leroy dariacore track too, but “F.U.C” is unbeatable, a two-minute hurricane of reckless chants, breakbeats, and addictive Jersey kicks. I was in the snare society Discord when the song dropped and I remember everyone was in disbelief.

Lil Uzi Vert - Just Wanna Rock (prod. MCVertt, Synthetic)

It’s scat club rap, all twisted chokes and guttural shrieks and single words like “damn” stretched over seven seconds with cyborgian vocal effects. The best part, the “hook,” is really just when MCVertt’s irresistibly jet-fueled beat gears into full effect. Jersey kicks pummel darkly like depth charge detonations as Uzi fires a storm of buhs, the sound of someone going so breathlessly hard all they can muster are frantic gasps.

PinkPantheress - “Do you miss me?” (prod. Dill Aitchison, Kaytranada) / “Reason” - Evilgiane remix

For those skeptics still wondering if PinkPantheress can write a song without jacking an earlier classic, this year of singles shows them she can. Her prime skill isn’t spotting killer beats. It’s the way she flutters her voice like petals swishing in a green field, and injects gloomy meditations on regret and broken romance with a sense of euphoric urgency. It’s a testament to PinkPantheress’ voice and melodies that practically every song on her remix album was also intoxicating, some nearly or as pretty as the original tunes. My favorite is the “Reason” flip, where evilgiane ditches the breakbeats for a stuttering barrage of low-end with twinges of itchy percussion. It’s like a blizzard in your ears.

Pokémon Scarlet & Violet - Penny Theme

I don’t even play the games anymore (who is Penny?) but this is bonkers. It’s difficult to imagine how the song even fits into the context of a cute cartoonscape. I feel like I’m out of my mind on the dancefloor at a loft rave, the strobes showering everyone in a neon delirium.

Quannnic - “sorry days” / “Sheets”

Kenopsia hovers somewhere between the ghostly, listless swell of MBV shoegaze and the infernal guitar rush of Deftones: rock music by a bedroom-producing teen steeped in digicore, so of course there are all sorts of other quirky stylistic motifs like bitcrushing and diaristic lyrics. When the guitar fades out on “sorry days” and the soundscape erupts into beeps toward the end, it feels like the song is zooming across the decades, from the dreamy indie rock of the late 1980s and early ‘90s to the processed electronic sound of today. It’s like an aural double-exposure photo or lenticular printing: one time period superimposed on another.

RealYungPhil - Everything We Need (prod. Evilgiane)

Evilgiane samples the sampler, nabbing Ant Clemons’ pixelated crooning and Ty Dolla Sign’s hypnotic woos from a Kanye song. He accelerates the warm voices into flickers of heavenly falsetto. RealYungPhil anchors everything on Earth with his deep tone and his lyrics, which weave a tapestry of decadence from cash to strippers to Montcler coats.

Rooster - DiamondsR4EVER

Shafts of light fall over drifting synths; Gud’s voice changes pitches, repeats itself, melts and teleports across the horizon. Slot beside Laura Les’ “Haunted” under ecstasy music, an artist failing but getting tantalizingly close to capturing what it feels like to experience the divine.

ROSALÍA - “SAOKO” (prod. ROSALÍA, Michael Uzowuru, Sir Dylan, Noah Goldstein)

Saoco papi, saoco, saoco papi, saoco, Rosalía repeats, her voice becoming increasingly fried like a dying squirrel’s final whimpers, until it dissolves in a flood of lewd bass so low not even a baby could limbo it. “SAOKO” downs genres like drinks—taste traces of reggaeton, experimental pop, manic jazz. Even if you can’t understand the lyrics you’ll be buzzed.

S1NINJA - “FRONTIN”

“FRONTIN” is tagged “Sci-Fi” on SoundCloud—a funny label, given there’s no “science fiction” rap scene on the internet, but it fits the music’s brew of weirdness. Drums stutter haphazardly, bass notes hit like plasma beams, and the vocals are braided radiantly. Every fragment of singing, mumbling and moaning buzzes off each other.

Tek lintowe - “Idle hands” (prod. mimics_gate) / “Balcony”

Welcome to Tek lintowe’s freaky cosmos of medieval soundfonts and slurred voices that echo into nothingness. The songs are like video game soundtracks reimagined as hauntological folk music, with a Proustian sense-memory effect that sends twitches of foggy childhood moments flying through my mind.

TiaCorine - “FreakyT” (prod. Honorable C.N.O.T.E.)

The beat is smoother than a zambonied ice rink; Tia’s voice is glistening, the verses full of eeees and squeezed rhymes that clink against each other like diamonds on a necklace.

Shed Theory - Cathedral (prod. ljisleep) / Joeyy ft. Marlon DuBois - “Muskrat” (prod. ljisleep)

“Cathedral” and “Muskrat” are like mutant descendants of the baleful glitchcore pioneered by early Nitemare mixed with Izaya Tiji’s ethereal muttering. The music video for the former captures its vibe perfectly: hooded figures skulking around the NYC subway system while dissociating, their feet floating “over the turnstiles” as pixelated shimmers and disembodied gasps flash in the background. “Muskrat” is even more evil and crooked, a two-minute hallucination of creaky, crawling voices that scratch the underside of your skull.

Yeat x Duster (FRUITBAT mashup)

An eerily enchanting gem in the nu-SoundClown canon. Without a maddening rage beat to back him up, Yeat’s spasming vocals turn hollow and haunting. He sounds like a ghost of a person, a barely-there sprite, like specks of dust dissolving inside Duster’s homely closet of drum and guitar.

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The Top 25

#25 - Destroy Lonely - “NOSTYLIST” (prod. Cxdy, Chef9thegod)

Sometimes I wonder what the lyrical appeal is of rappers like Yeat, Ken Carson, and Destroy Lonely. Sure, their beats have some of the most gloriously unhinged and futuristic production right now — that’s mainly why I’m listening — but I’m curious why fans obsess over the frequently awful lyrics, spamming them on Twitter and TikTok. For these diehards, the rappers are not just disembodied voices ad-libbing into the aural ether but role models and tastemakers; every piece of designer clothing they wear is bought by a stan somewhere, everything they say is a maxim to mimic.

A lot of it comes down to effortless charisma, or the perception of it. I can see why people fawn over Lone. There’s an elegance to his voice — perpetually radiant and unblemished, it’s the vocal equivalent of editors airbrushing the micro-spots and sweaty pores off someone’s face. “Bitch, I wake up, no stylist,” he brags, spitting shimmering pixels with every syllable. His boasts are often banal—”Fly across the globe,” “Told my folks I’m getting rich”—but told with such stainless opulence they flash alive in your brain. The flexes have a kind of simple rawness that adds to the allure, like he’s too busy to write out a full sentence. This song bangs in large part because of Cxdy and Chef9thegod’s holographic instrumental. It’s like a more thrillingly electric upgrade of Carti’s “Sky,” which already has a dizzying magic carpet ride of a beat.

When Destroy Lonely’s debut dropped, I was in Los Angeles for a couple of weeks, driving a lot. I vividly remember zooming across town with this song jetting out of the speakers, throwing the volume up and rolling all the windows down. Cool Santa Monica wind rushing through my hair. I didn’t really like the album (not enough beat variation, and Lone’s endless polish makes everything congeal into sleek gloop after a while; I wish it had more of the kind of fuzzy trap he tagged “Ambient” on SoundCloud), but this song kept smacking. It straddles the line between “organically pristine” and “so pristine it’s revoltingly plastic-sounding” (a la “Miss the Rage”) in an uncanny way. You keep thinking you’re going to tire of it but it never wears.

OJC’s “NOSTYLIST” mashup with Crystal Castles’ “Crimewave” is also killer.

#24 - elusin - “Elskling”

You’re sitting on a grassy mound in the middle of a snowy forest clearing. The air is cool, a gentle wind blows around you and tickles the trees. You can hear animals near you, maybe foxes or rabbits, brushing softly against crackly leaves, scraping the dirt. You’re sitting there alone but caught in this invisible orchestra of nature, every sound wrapping together in a quiet symphony of life.

A similar kind of frozen forest region is a landscape in one of Elusin’s music videos, and it’s the setting I imagine for all of her enchantingly foggy, snow-streaked music. I stumbled on the Norwegian-American musician one day while excavating deep into a SoundCloud rabbit hole, where the oddest gems I normally find are cursed mixes and futuristic elevator music. Elusin’s songs are practically the opposite of that outsider gawkiness and asphyxiating low-end chaos — her vocals are whisker-thin, the soundscapes slow and sweet. It’s surprising to learn that she’s worked multiple times with Sematary, the Salem-inspired horrorcore rapper whose rap is so bass-baked it sounds like a parody. Her end product is closer to an Imogen Heap who spends her days living in a cabin meditating with woodland creatures.

“Elskling,” which translates from Norwegian to “darling,” is my favorite song of hers. The vocals are split between English and Norwegian, but it doesn’t really matter because she deploys her voice like an instrument. Every line is smothered in so much reverb, it seems to trail off endlessly, the syllables growing smaller and glassier until the next lyric drifts in to continue the fragile fractal. She dances between angel-high registers as a bittersweet synth unfurls gently in the background. There’s a second version of the song where the synths are largely replaced by what sounds like a warm string instrument, which makes the track feel even more like a remote hollow of woodland and voice. Listening to the song while walking around the squalid, congested corridors of New York City makes me want to be spirited away to Norway so I can spend a year in a hut alone, reading and tending to my fire. File under “witch folk”?

#23 - skaiwater - “#miles”

2021 was the year a new generation of Jersey club rap took off. This year, a wide array of musicians discovered you can do more than just rap madly over Jersey club drums: you can scream and chant, whisper and gasp; you can warble with hyperpop doses of Auto-Tune; you can garble and snarl over an increasingly accelerating club rhythm until everything implodes. One of my favorite off-kilter jersey club experiments in 2022 is the skaiwater- and jdolla-produced “#miles.” Most of the track isn’t even proper Jersey club—it’s a drumless, twinkly synthscape full of skaiwater’s candied coos. But then those fiery kicks slowly rise in the background, flickering softly, biding their time, until finally they streak into the spotlight. The musician’s lyrics about relationship problems flutter away, replaced by frail whimpers and exclamations like “Oh my god,” which juxtapose prettily with the dissonant, pounding kick drums. There’s an excess of artists and producers who don’t toy with structure at all; as a result, their songs can feel like static clumps of cardboard—just a looped beat front-to-back. But “#miles” has a wonderful arc, a slow tension that makes you yearn for the kick drop.

There’s so much jersey club being produced now — some of it reeking of labels and big names exploiting the regional sound’s sudden ubiquity — it feels sort of like how the Amen break and UK garage rhythms were revived last year by a medley of musicians. TikTok’s viral sounds ran the whole gamut from bedroom pop’n’bass to UK garage softened into beachy dream pop. A cynic would say these re-trends augur the end of true innovation, that our future horizons will be confined to nostalgia-bait, drab retools of old sounds and styles. What’s next, the festival trap renaissance? Trance drill? Is it time for gabber and speedcore’s main character pop era? Still, a lot of these club offsprings like “#miles” are inventive in sound and structure. And nothing ever forms in a vacuum, anyway; the genre mutations could spawn their own scenes. The vanguard of music now is a tessellation of microscenes that combine previously popular styles—specific rhythms and vocal techniques and Auto-Tune effects—to make sounds that were once unimaginable.

#22 - Wednesday - “Bull Believer”

I’m a sucker for hard rock that doesn’t just whack you with a blunt fist of aggression and noise but impishly manipulates melody and tension, making a mess out of ordinary song structures. Tease me with a long, slowly-ascending climb that gradually whirls out of control. Lull my brain into a synthy trance, then obliterate me with a sudden smack of delirious noise. I love having no idea where something is going, feeling disoriented and lost in a labyrinth of sound.

That’s how I felt when I first listened to “Bull Believer,” maybe the most shiver-inducing rock I’ve heard this year. Wednesday’s eight-minute epic has all the creeping buildups and vertiginous drops of a psychological thriller, gradually ramping up until the final act crests in a fit of tremulous rage. The vocalist Karly Hartzman is as expressive as any great actress. She grows increasingly distraught until the last desperate moments of the song, when she begins to howl and scream and cry, her voice quivering as she sobbingly slurs the words “finish him,” “finiiiissssh himmmm” in angry repetition, crashing like a wave against the pummeling guitars and drums. It’s a blaze of raw, nearly unbearable emotion: not emo music in the sense of artfully dainty and in-your-face vocals but a kind of excruciating method singing. Her entire self is hurled into that fire, her vocal cords sound like they’re about to tear as she claws out the final verse.

#21 - islurwhenitalk - “pink neon lights”

islurwhenitalk makes music with a different center of gravity, a different sense of space and movement that’s much quirkier than ours. The songs speed and slow, glitch and stutter at random; little soundbites explode and then re-form; records jump forward and rewind like a broken film. Despite the chaos, everything is bound by a weird sort of cryptic language, a blundering coherence. You can sense it in the name, islurwhenitalk—five words compressed into a 14-letter monolith, a jumbled mass of verbs and Is, the vowels pressed into each other. The name also speaks to the visceral intensity of his music, the way “islurwhenitalk” verbally evokes someone slurring their words, unleashing a hot gust of breath and crumpled language in your ears.

islurwhenitalk is prolific as hell and his capacious catalog contains some of the most creative remixes and one-off experiments in recent memory (he’s also a pioneer of multiple SoundCloud microstyles, vampjerk and sigilkore). “Pink Neon Lights” is a personal favorite apex of strangeness. The song begins with lavish piano notes that lead into the graceful plucks of a string instrument, an unusual sonic setting even for Slur. But then his voice comes in and he defaces the classical composition with a relentless barrage of bass jerks. There’s an art to the way Slur blows out these bass notes. Rather than make them so brutal it’s deafening, he opts for this metallic, springy texture. The effect is like slinkies exploding. He has a knack for knowing just how far to crank the low-end and on what instrumentals to deploy the distortion. None of those “808 boosting” YouTube channels could make a song as gloriously bass-butchered as his version of Gunna’s “P power.”

#20 - Two Shell - “home” / “Memory” (tie)

For all of Two Shell’s madcap antics — making an article self-destruct after 24 hours, allegedly deploying decoys for live sets — what really counts is the music. I’ve listened to it in a variety of settings: headphones in my bed, out of car speakers on multiple road trips, muffled under conversation at a party, at a live show. What always strikes me is how soothingly steady the music is despite its frenetic pulse. There’s so much happening in bangers like “home” — fried vocals fluttering like metallic fairy chirrups, frisson-inducing percussion rolls, splatters of trebly sonic paint — but the layers are mixed with such ordered, tidy control they merge into one twitching organism. Even more organized and restrained but equally kinetic, “Memory” marshals bass booms and raining synth droplets into a small spartan army of clubby electricity. Try to resist nodding your head gently or moving your foot when it plays, you can’t.

I find it funny that Two Shell is often characterized as “hyperpop” (or some synonym of “hyperpop-tinged”) because the tag doesn’t really fit, whether you’re talking about the SOPHIE genus of capital-H HYPERPOP or the more lawless, rap-infected digicore scene. This is pure electronic music, without any inane quotables or incendiary drops or even a coherent vocal presence. It’s fast and intense but the instrumental scaffolding is totally seamless, so tightly programmed and tastefully haywire you almost long for it to suddenly crash and disintegrate a la Jane Remover’s “52 Blue Mondays”—give us some real havoc! Still, listening to this carefully controlled chaos offers its own pleasures. It’s almost like a very busy strain of ambient.

#19 - Luci4 - “ON GANG”

Sigilkore’s typical instrumentals are torn-up, desiccated wastelands of synth and bass that perfectly match the subgenre’s unearthly vocal styles: sibilating, snarling, purring demonically. But in a weird twist, Luci4’s hardest song this year may be one of his most unnervingly mellow. “ON GANG” is evil elevator music; Luci4 rewires a lethargic sample into a sleazy, smooth beat and then fiendishly hisses over it like a dementor blowing smoke in your ears.

When Luci4 started racking up hits repeatedly on TikTok in 2021, there were lots of questions: Would sigilkore reach the mainstream? Would his music change with more spotlight? For the most part, nothing has really altered; sigilkore is almost entirely underground, confined to the deep recesses of SoundCloud, and Luci4 is still experimenting, spewing uncategorizable loosies into the digital ether. Sigilkore has splintered in myriad angles—there’s the trance-inducing electronics of rachyl and kaystrueno, the dirty rawness of aghast and lungskull, the glitch-incinerated mayhem of lecie and universe. Yet even as the sound expands its boundaries, the scene continues to revolve around key innovators like Luci4, who has unleashed a torrent of wild tracks this year from seething susurrations to bitcrushed mixes. I would take an entire tape of ambient terrorscapes like “ON GANG,” but I also doubt he’s ever going to make a song like it again. Luci4 is restless and impossible to predict. There still aren’t any real interviews with him. Who knows where the hell he’s going next.

#18 - Harto Falión - "{______ }" (prod. evilgiane, whitearmor, gud)

I don’t know too much about Harto Falión beyond that he’s affiliated with Surf Gang and he’s one of the best at making anxious rap. Some of it’s written a little on the nose (“panic@the_kickback_”), but the production in his music is otherworldly. The beats are often pensive and dreamy, murky and lucid, abysses of poignant synth and turbo bass that swallow up his weary voice.

“{*______* }” assembles a holy trinity of left-field rap producers—evilgiane, whitearmor, and gud—to produce what is perhaps the most radiantly nervy beat I’ve heard this year. Bass bombs rain down from the sky as layers of eerie synth swivel and dissipate like ghostly fireflies flashing in and out of your vision. Harto starts without any words, just a series of hums that shine and fade in brightness as parallel layers of whimpers flicker in the background. It sounds transcendental, as though his spirit is rising out of his body and fusing with the spectral beat.

What sealed the deal for me was the cover art, which feels like some random image Harto had on his phone and was like “errrhmm let’s use this.” It’s a photo of a clear plastic storage box with a desktop propped on it, along with a Razer gaming mouse, a mug of some drink, a tray littered with cigarettes. In other words, a very mundane display, which is a funny juxtaposition with the cosmic sounds coming out of my speakers. That said, there’s something very real about it, the simplicity of the arrangement, the lack of any kind of pose—just this homespun computer setup. It also speaks to the way paranoia and manic depressive states can manifest in the most ordinary settings.

#17 - lecie - “ex post facto”

One of the coolest stylistic tendencies of this new wave of internet rapper-beatmakers is the way they completely mutilate the architecture of their songs. Since many of them produce as well as rap, they tend to maim their performances with erratic glitching and chaotic pitch-switching, and lacerate the finished mixes with ruptures and distortions. The end result often doesn’t even feel like rap anymore but some liminal genre somewhere between lyric music and wordless electronica.

lecie’s “ex post facto” has it all: frenetic vocal malfunctions, hectic tonal heel turns, moments where the sound suddenly falls out, dizzying bitcrushed textures. My favorite part of the song is how he deploys Auto-Tune, which has been used so frequently and for such wildly creative experiments by this point that it’s hard to imagine anyone doing anything new with it.

But I’ve never seen anyone integrate it into the guts of a song like lecie does here. He’s rapping with the device the whole time, remorselessly dissing people, until he decides to turn it off because he’s about to say something “real” and needs his raw voice. He does that for three lines, then turns the Auto-Tune back on at the same time as the instrumental seems to speed up, so it feels like the entire song is swept up in a riptide of pixels and shiny throbbing. He starts chanting “I’m too fucking real, I can’t help it,” but because of the vocal disfiguration, it sounds like he’s moaning “Auto-Tune fucking real I can’t help it,” like the tool is a compulsion he can’t shake. Soon the song decomposes into a fit of sputtering vocals and slamming synthesizers.

#16 - Yung Lean ft. FKA twigs - “Bliss” (prod. Fredrik Okazaki)

It was such a surprising release—both the FKA twigs linkup and the post-punk turn—that worked shockingly well. Twigs’ acrobatic melodies are the perfect counterpoint to Lean’s sedate mumbles, and his jumpy flow and tactile images (“We got each other like bones and blood… like brothers in mud”) come alive across the keys spinning like bicycle wheels. After he raps steadily for a verse, it’s a thrill to hear Twigs fly in and start somersaulting over the instrumental. The main refrain was sampled from the Soviet new wave group Alyans’ “At Dawn,” which was released in 1987, and you can kind of tell—”Bliss” feels outside-time, like it could’ve been produced in any decade of the last four.

Like Twigs, I too “only wanna feel the bliss on bliss”—luckily this song provides some.

#15 - DJ Re:Code - "adhd" ft. tobre and "keeper" ft. goji! & BIO (tie)

I remember around the time 645AR’s “Yoga” went viral early in the pandemic, I started to see TikTok commenters apply the language of ASMR (“brain-tingling,” “oddly pleasurable”) to it and similar tunes like Luci4’s “All Eyez on Me” and Yameii Online’s “Baby My Phone.” The angel-high squeals in these tracks contrasted nicely against harsh bass to create a weirdly soothing friction. Then there were aural ecosystems of ebullient beeps like galen tipton’s “tadpoles lullaby.” Some fans said the soundscapes had a kind of quasi-medicinal quality, scratching their scalps in all the right spots.

I don’t know if I’ve ever heard a more satisfying song in this brain-massage vein than DJ Re:Code’s “adhd.” Headphone listening feels like your mind is playing a hyperspeed round of Whack-A-Mole: yanked left and right and up and down to process all the sonic squelches and fizzes and spritzes and shocks firing every quarter-second. Guest vocalist tobre’s lyrics are similarly twisty, pretzelling between claustrophobic confessions (“So scared of making up my mind”) and brief flashes of hope (“I know that I’m better off alive”), exhausted groans (“I keep trying and trying and trying”) and confused realizations. It’s like a thrillingly electric fidget spinner for the ears.

Then there’s the goji! and BIO-featuring “keeper,” which dials back the intensity only a little while retaining the infectious busyness. Simultaneously warmly tactile and coldly computerized, it could soundtrack some futuristic wildlife habitat. Bionic animals buzz and whirr, flapping their metallic wings and vibrating like cyborgian cicadas. The only constant is the vocals, which radiate across the lattices of noise like steady rays of sunshine.

#14 - Uffie - “dominoes” (prod. Lokoy, Toro y Moi)

I went to see Uffie live earlier this year as part of a Subculture event, mainly because I wanted to hear “Pop The Glock,” a proto-hyperpop banger from 2006 that glistens like holographic vinyl wrap. I ended up leaving before she played the song (maybe she never did), and the main memory I have of the night is a vague sense of being high and struggling to retrieve my Uniqlo jacket from the overstuffed coat check. But I also remember how carefree everyone in that dark, smoky, strobe-streaked room seemed as Uffie started playing—bodies hopping and arms flying.

A couple of months later, Uffie dropped Sunshine Factory, her first album in over a decade. I had no idea she hadn’t dropped for so long, nor that she was ramping up to release when I saw her perform. The first time I listened, I was halfway through a cross-country roadtrip and stuck in a New Music drought, and the tape hit like a tidal wave of neon energy. There were the sunbeam rhyme schemes of “where does the party go?” (pure Mad Libs chaos: marijuana, Nirvana, Obama..), the wandering woozy chill of “cool,” the delightful way her voice does a little sonic curtsy at the end of the refrain “think you're sweet, I got the juice” on “sophia.”

The highlight for me was always the Lokoy & Toro y Moi-produced “dominoes,” a flirty tickle of indie pop that sends a montage of moments hurling through my brain—evenings on the beach; eating perfectly ripe strawberries in the first days of summer; lying in a meadow surrounded by blooming flowers. I love the way Uffie dips between Italian and English in the line “do a dance a la adagio, till we fall like dominoes,” and the second layer of vocals underneath that sound like fairies hiccuping. The effortlessly blithe song gives me a similar feeling to the pleasure I get from saying the artist’s name, “Uffie.” It’s a cool breeze of a word; a pretty hill of light vowels, the uuh running up into the hard “ff,” then flying down with eee. A little intimate and playful, like giggling at a friend’s joke in class when you’re supposed to be silent.

#13 - Yeat - “Still countin” (prod. Synthetic, Rision, ninetyniiine, mTwenty) / “Out thë way” (prod. Snapz, BNYX) (tie)

It’s so easy to meme on Yeat’s music, but its popularity obviously says a lot about our generation and the kind of music we want to spend our days hearing. Consider it another extension of Carti’s fetishization of the voice-as-texture, a mode where no word or zany inflection is too silly to spew out of your mouth as long as it sounds electric and makes fans want to go crazy, a mind-numbing distraction from the chaos swirling everywhere. It’s an anti-politics of vibes and mosh pits, silly slang and gleaming ad-libs, the musical form of corecore’s surreal realness. He has enough memorable one-liners and suddenly vulnerable, reflective lyrics, and a commitment to the craft and his own sound, that fans respect him and feel like they can relate.

There’s also an alluring facelessness to Yeat’s music, the way he rarely posts online and has done barely any interviews (and in them, said very little of note—his demeanor is like someone who mostly chills at home, grinding on music). His languor in these interviews creates such a stark contrast with the throttling charisma of his music. It’s like Yeat is really just an empty vessel or a conduit for astral noises from another dimension.

Choosing favorite Yeat songs feels counterintuitive since a lot of his music is amorphously similar. But in my head Yeat has two main categories of songs: the hypergloss banger rampage that’s become a template for new-gen rage rappers, and the stranger, more eccentric songs—all his unexpectedly funky and vividly eerie tracks. So here’s one of each.

“Still countin” is the archetypal Yeat rager: a pleasure-calibrated machine of evil synth and unhinged mouth mayhem, an assault on the ears with the sky-high grandeur of arena rock.

“Out thë way” has got to be one of the goofiest songs I’ve heard this year. I dunno if it was meant to be goofy, but the Snapz & BNYX beat’s squelches and sloshes make me think of cartoon animals belching. It sounds like Brobee from Yo Gabba Gabba or Wow Wow Wubbzy hopped on the track. The fact that Yeat is seriously rapping and flexing his panoply of riches while these gastrointestinal moans ripple endlessly in the background makes it even funnier. The song also inspired maybe the best TikTok dance of 2022 (so viral they even got cats doing it).

#12 - Ame - “Degree” (prod. Royal, y2tnb, Brycenknwn, Ame)

One of my favorite scenes/sounds this year was Regalia, a regal style pioneered by producers like Royal, Reset, and Gloyourkrazy and rappers like Devstacks and Iayze. This is trap’s imperial era: court music made for monarchs lying on stacks of gold coins, richly Auto-Tuned vocals wrapped in a tapestry of synthwork and fragile piano cascades. After years of popular “no melody” tracks with stark, dissonant bass-beats, here is Regalia with its decoration and excess.

No rapper has risen to the decadent heights of these beats better than Ame, who knows just how to stretch his voice and distort certain phrases to maximize the sound’s thrill. Peep how he warps his flow practically a dozen times on “Charger,” from singing to speed-rapping to hollering “ri-dee-dim-dim” like a gleeful power-mad maniac. On “Degree,” which he helped produce along with Royal, y2tnb, and Brycenknwn, Ame is a savant solving a dense puzzle: he raps and moans and whimpers, often all at once in separate layers, filling up every pocket between the frenetic hi-hats and cavernous bass thuds. It’s faintly redolent of the more stately and choral Migos tracks but taken to the most indulgent extreme. It sounds simultaneously primeval and distantly futuristic, like an 800-year-old artifact dug up from a lost Atlantis but also a creation beamed in from 800 years forward.

#11 - Sudan Archives - ChevyS10 (prod. Ben Dickey, Andre Elias)

“ChevyS10” submerges you in Sudan Archives’ cinematic sound-world so vividly. The six-minute track is ostensibly about a woman recalling a night when she was drifting around with a man in his Chevy.

The song unfurls like a bleary, radiantly colorful dream sequence. It begins with an expanse of vaporous synth and gently curling guitar, the washed-out haze of sound occasionally punctured by moments that register with startling clarity, such as a cell phone ringing or buttons being dialed. The emotion is hyperreal yet indescribable, a tangle of longing, nostalgia, pride, and satisfaction. Brittney Parks’ voice is simultaneously misty and pristine, jumping and flowing at you from multiple layers like jumbled thoughts trying to clutch your attention in a semi-conscious state. The drums switch up just enough—from fretting hi-hats to a drifting dance rhythm to a boisterous party beat—to give the song a sonic narrative, like it’s moving through time. "We gotta make a decision," she insists near the end between laughs and filtered vocals, instruments carousing in the background. "We can leave tonight or we can die this way." The sound evokes one of those reflective or cathartic night rides around town when all the other cars are tucked away and the traffic lights are barely flickering anymore.

#10 - Asian Doll ft. Bandmanrill - “Get Jumped” (prod. Bankroll Got It) / Bandmanrill - “BANDTHOVEN” (prod. McVertt)

I don’t know if it’s possible to listen to “Get Jumped” without bopping your head or jumping around in a frenetic sprint-dance. There’s no messing around with an extended intro/outro here, it’s just two minutes of pogoing kicks, clipped vocals, a smooth sample and infectious, swift raps from Asian Doll and Bandmanrill.

In recent months, I’ve gravitated toward the more distorted corner of Jersey club (thanks in large part to billdifferen’s stellar recommendations; peep this ridiculous nightmarish mix), but it’s a joy to hear the two rappers glide over a particularly buoyant instrumental (produced by Bankroll Got It). It feels almost like we’re watching them ricochet around a trampoline at nightcore speed. Jersey club rap is such a cool sound, partly because of the way it forces the vocalists to bend around the beat—either go crazy or get swallowed up by the typhoon of kicks—and because of how it both hypnotizes and energizes listeners. The stuttering rhythm of the drums can make you feel like you’re transcending, slipping into a daze of hectic footwork, but the frantic raps are constantly jutting out and seizing your attention.

It’s a fantastically frenzied combination, often made even more enticing by the unorthodox samples used by Jersey club producers. Any genre or time period is up for grabs, from Steve Lacy’s 2022 “Bad Habit” and “Miss the Rage” to Minecraft music and Mai Yamane’s 1980 “Tasogare.” As ridiculous as it sounds, even classical music can be thrown into the max-power blender of kick drums. For Bandmanrill’s deliriously atemporal “BANDTHOVEN,” McVertt snatched the intro of Ludwig’s “5th Symphony” and looped it to oblivion. Like Playboi Carti’s century-defying Bach rewire “Vamp Anthem,” it delicately rides the line between “meme music” and bizarrely scintillating—imagine a moshpit in a symphony hall.

#9 - Nilüfer Yanya - "stabilise" / "chase me" (tie)

Nilüfer gets so much done with spartan lyrics and subtly disquieting instrumentation. I love the fusion of the wistful chords and drums with the febrile tone of her voice as it snakes from panicked to hushed and back on “stabilise.” The shivering guitar more or less repeats itself, evoking a person trying to move but caught in the same cycle.

It’s the same with “chase me,” a song at least partly about the satisfaction of being wanted; the crunching and chattering drums are foreboding, as hard and brusque as a dead romance, and you can hear the weariness in her voice when she cries “it feels like it’s already gone, and it feels like a cold setting sun,” her tone wavering like she’s trying to rid herself of this emotional weight.

#8 - GREED - “summer mixx 2k22”

Maybe the most electrifying underground rap collective right now is GREED. Its current and former artists are making some of the weirdest and wildest fuck-the-mainstream music of this era—and most of them seem to be young, bred on a diet of Roblox, fried memes, cartoons, and brain-blistering internet rap. The group is full of diverse styles, but it’s at least partially defined by blasts of bass shards and spectral vocals mixed with sickly bright synth melodies, so raw and spartan it sounds like it was produced on a barebones DAW like Audacity. The beats are some of the grimiest, most feculent and frayed I’ve ever heard, sputtering like malfunctioning motorcycles in a pit of mud. It’s nearly the inverse of other trendy internet rap genres—dreamy pluggscapes and digicore’s intricately produced compositions. Lushness and stability are foreign concepts in this realm; the native language is atrophy and apocalypse.

GREED’s summer mix is a frantic compression of the collective’s expansive catalog, squeezing 18 tracks by 27 performers and producers into 14 minutes of hyperkinetic dissonance. Some songs play for under 30 seconds before crashing into the next; yuke’s cute but serrated “hi tech” with jaydes only gets a nine-second hook. It’s a highlight reel for the GREED Extended Universe: there’s *67 and yuke’s neon-green collective anthem “greed” and Maplekore inventor kaystrueno’s “want and feel,” which sounds like an angel kingdom collapsing as it falls to an insurgent army of demons; there’s zinoblade’s “ddos in effect,” which spirals and glitches like your Wi-Fi connection is literally being flooded with excess traffic in live-time, and even a pixelated flip of “Big Poppa” by *67, pegasisflame, and thukk, in which Biggie’s vocals have been excised and replaced by defiled vocal layers and unsettling giggle effects.

While not everyone in the mix is explicitly in the group—the blogger and YouTube archivist Arai told me the collective’s roster is perpetually mutating, with loads of people passing through the group in a year—it’s a thrilling look into this distorted and desiccated chasm of SoundCloud. Internet collectives are ephemeral ecosystems, often collapsing from petty or vicious beefs and infighting, so it’s cool to see a group statement that captures this moment in time when many of the artists are still discovering their sounds and sparking creatively off each other.

#7 - Hemlocke Springs - “girlfriend”

“Girlfriend” sprang onto my TikTok feed one day soundtracking an edit of a cat as it was digitally discombobulated: its body parts compressed into a ball with a tuft of white hair, then its limbs warped around until it became a kangaroo. I was initially more engrossed by the video, but I kept seeing the song attached to all these wondrously weird clips, an inventory of eccentric sweetness—an elderly woman reading manga, a greyhound with bald thigh syndrome wrapped in a sweater, a tribute to the cuteness of capybaras—and “Girlfriend” slowly hooked me.

Hemlocke does so much with her voice here—it’s like the dense ad-lib-panopticon of late-stage trap but for homespun synth-pop. She sings smoothly, like she’s lost in reverie, and then drops into a fiercer, more operatic tone; she hollers the line “Oh my god I love you!!!” in a voice that sounds like post-puberty Elmo, and adds a vigorous “stab, stab, stab” murmur at another point. My favorite part is the bridge, a spree of multi-toned lines that sound like she’s having a micro-dialogue with the cynic and optimist voices dueling in her brain: desperately confessing what she desires and then doubting, in a funnily grumbly tone, whether she’s ever gonna get it.

Hemlocke Springs’ lore—she's a medical student, she found her pseudonym through a random name generator, she has only ever released two songs and they both leapt to TikTok stardom—makes the music’s silliness and Jack Stauber-meets-Marina sound feel even more fun and serendipitous. This isn't some cash-hunting label or veteran musician posing as quirky. “Girlfriend” almost never even entered our world—she said in a TikTok video she made the song over three years ago and once “abhorred” it, thinking she would never post it.

#6 - Izaya Tiji - “I drink blood” (prod. Souljaspirits)

Flashy bars and aggressive voices are so fetishized in rap/pop that it can be almost off-putting to hear someone as wispy and understated as Izaya Tiji, whose music sometimes sounds like Young Thug warbling and muttering in a library. I love how he uses filters and melodic layering to make gleaming fractals out of his voice. On songs like “Visiting,” his ASMR-soft quavers shimmer with reverb, the lyrics so indistinct his voice becomes a specter of gaseous falsetto, like an echo with no origin, a sonic hieroglyph. Even his more kinetic tracks like “I drink blood” are cautious and fragile, the melodies rippling like holographic cardstock. Souljaspirits’ beat is one of the most gorgeously haunting I’ve heard, the perfect habitat for Izaya’s billowing cries and threats.

#5 - Jane Remover - "Royal Blue Walls"

Jane’s music has gradually unspooled in length and feeling over the last couple of years. Teen Week was pressurized and claustrophobic, drowned in angst; Frailty was similarly dense and cluttered with sounds, but the songs were newly expansive, carefully-plotted biomes of beat drops and impressionistic passages. The six-minute “Royal Blue Walls” echoes the best emo rocktronica of Frailty but with a gentler, fragile fingerprint. Their voice is light and sleek, so wispy it’s seemingly on the verge of collapse; the instrumental rises cautiously, coming into focus like a faraway landscape slowly appearing on a skyline of blue-gray mist. I love how the second half of the song unfolds, from Jane’s slow repetition to the way the instruments ramp up for the climax. “Somehow I’m still never satisfied, satisfied, satisfied,” she repeats as the song spirals into chaos, Jane’s cries flashing like lightning in the squall of noise.

#4 - xaviersobased - "far" / "choir" prod. cru (tie)

There’s a crookedness to Xavier’s music that might make you recoil at first. The bass is often brutally blown out, the songs glitch and buffer like an awkward dance, and the vocals are sometimes minced and looped into incoherent chains of gleaming sound-shards, certain words laced with so much reverb it sounds like he’s keening into an abyss. Barely any other artists have so forcefully rewired my brain to not only cope with but actively seek that hazy asymmetry, this parallel sound-world of wonky beats and denatured vocals. Once you start sinking into the slanted rhythm of songs like “crisp dubs” and “patchmade,” all of his music begins to hit. He’s had a crazy run of tapes and loosies this year—you could make a top 15 list of just Xavier tracks.*

A lot of my favorite xaviersobased music is the left-field rap that’s so deformed and otherworldly it’s basically sound art. “far” could be an alien civilization’s pop chart topper: it’s 88 seconds of speaker-obliterating synths and bass with just one vocal (“ah” or a crumpled pronunciation of “eiffel”) repeating endlessly. Bizarrely, the song brings to mind the infamous Crazy Frog song; the vocals make me imagine the Swedish blue cartoon amphibian melting in a PCP overdose. Even shorter (0:58) but similarly demented, the cru-produced “choir” revolves around brightly-pitched gurgles and single words—“like,” “desire,” “choir”—that flicker with hope before being scrambled and steamrolled by a murderous bassline.

#3 - Bladee & Ecco2k - "The Flag is Raised" / Thaiboy Digital - "I'm Fresh" (tie)

2022 may have been the best year ever for drainers and sad boys. There was Bladee, Ecco2k, and Whitearmor’s iridescent Crest, and later in the year Bladee’s madcap solo album; Lean’s eclectic, often thrilling Stardust, and Thaiboy Digital finally released a new record. That’s not even counting all the work by the squads’ producers—Gud’s one-off beats and angelic tape as Rooster, Whitearmor’s crystalline collection of wedding songs.

It was fascinating seeing how the crowd aesthetics differed between Drain Gang and Yung Lean’s Knockdown Center shows this year. The former was quirkmaxxed: crammed stage to bar with college kids and hyperpop nerds awash in neon garments and creative makeup. Lean’s common disciple, in contrast, was closer to your typical streetwear-obsessed male rap fan, and the age seemed to skew older. I remember the demographics were once roughly the same, years ago, but now there’s a divide, which you can trace through to the way these musicians’ sounds have diverged.

Lean is still making experimental rap (and the occasional lick of post-punk) while Bladee & Ecco2k have gone nearly pure pop. Not pop like Taylor Swift or Ariana Grande, it’s their own mutant creation that would never take the charts. One of the best they’ve done in this vein is the fruity-sweet and vocally androgynous “The Flag is Raised.” “Here comes a feeling, you should never let it go,” Bladee advises at the start, like you’ve just been dropped in an otherworld where feelings have the form of visible shapes, able to be grasped or reached for, touchable like critters or tree branches. “Caress that feeling, the feeling in you,” he coos gently.

Perhaps the most surprisingly infectious release from any Drain Gang extended universe member in 2022 was Thaiboy Digital’s “I’m Fresh.” It’s a blizzard of hooks with a dizzying instrumental by Whitearmor. Rhyming “pesos” with Jeff Bezos, repeating the words “I’m fresh” five times for the chorus in increasingly out-of-breath tones so it sounds like he’s about to asphyxiate on his own freshness, spinning up a delirious dance to match the vertiginous rhythm—it’s all brilliant, and the track isn’t even 90 seconds long.

#2 - Nia Archives - "Baianá"

Its recipe may be straightforward: take a sample and mold it around unyieldingly furious breakbeats. But the result is massive. The sunbaked melodies of the Brazilian group Barbatuques’ “Baianá” sound absolutely mad when sped up and slathered with reverb like this—picture a nightcored choir warbling frantically in a dimly lit tunnel jammed with neon ravers.

Among all the best artists in the last few years’ zoomer renaissance of breakbeat-heavy music—from PinkPantheress and vertigoaway to Jane Remover and other digicore craziness—I don’t think anyone has revived and rewired the core sound of jungle as thrillingly as Nia Archives. She can do both the no-holds-barred blaze of breaks and a more intimate, starry-eyed strain of the genre, the kind of “bedroom jungle” you could play for a date. Nia sounds like she’s singing in cursive over the bed squeaks and tenderly zippy strings of “Luv Like,” as though dreamily savoring the knowledge that another person will stand by her no matter what (she has said the song is actually about her struggles with body dysmorphia and self-love).

#1 - yeule - “Bites on My Neck” / “Don’t Be So Hard on Your Own Beauty” (tie)

The first time I listened to Glitch Princess, I was walking home from a movie at 2 a.m. and the streets of Manhattan were buzzing quietly. I don’t listen to albums in full much anymore, but I was hooked by the cyborgian sheen of yeule’s music. There are so many layers of pixelated textures and the vocals are always frothing and mutating, melting and reforming like an algorithm gone berserk. It was the perfect soundtrack for strolling past twitchy digital advertisements on 8th Avenue and passing through a desolate Union Square.

So much of yeule’s aesthetic—from the glitch-slashed music videos to their use of zalgo text, which mangles words with a vertical cascade of symbols—is related to ideas of malfunction and tech disarray. My favorite Glitch Princess songs capture what it might feel like for the screen world to crack and fissure, to crumble and reveal a heartbeat behind the facade of machinery. “Bites on My Neck” is full of tormented lyrics about “bleeding through” and imagining killing someone with bare hands, but the music is showered in robo-cries and synth zaps, the drums ramming so hard it sounds like someone breaking through whatever unspecified agony they’re experiencing. The best song, “Don’t Be So Hard on Your Own Beauty,” is an acoustic curveball on an album rife with digital distortion. When it hits halfway through the record, wedged between dense arrangements of filtered vocals and computerized synths, it feels almost shockingly raw and tender.

Transhumanism isn’t as popular a musical theme as you might expect nowadays—maybe the concept has been tainted by the swarm of virtual “musicians” and metaverse grifting. With yeule, who identifies as non-binary and also a literal cyborg, the emo-robo persona isn’t an engineered pose so much as a tool they use to explore selfhood and conjure up unnerving feelings using all these poignant beeps and dissonant stutters and freaky ruptures, sounds that people might not normally associate with sadness or pleasure in music. The musician said in an interview they have a habit of saying “hello” and “goodnight” to their PC when they turn it on and off, and that devices act nicer to yeule if they’re nice to the devices as well, as though there’s a reciprocal exchange of affection. You can sense this mutual understanding in these half-cyber, half-human ballads, the way it sounds like yeule is teasing an entire new language of emotion out of the machines.

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