December 6, 2022
In 2022, shows and concerts finally polka-dotted our calendars again, and we returned to our regular weekend crate digs. And while we were standing in the glow of the stage lights at our favorite venues again (BS staffers were regulars at the Georgia Theatre and Tipitina’s) and pawing around at our local record stores (you’ll hear from a few of the shop owners here, too), the artists behind our favorite albums emerged from the past two years in new lights and with new sounds, too.
Anchored in dichotomies of anxiety and faith, nostalgia and momentum, so many of these records represent reimagined futures — an artist shapeshifting genres, a young musician reinterpreting references beyond their years, a group trying to make sense of our era’s senselessness, or an unsung singer-songwriter heard decades later. Their origins range from a South Georgia barn to the West Texas desert, storied studios to small towns, a Peabody Hotel room to the Sahara, New Orleans clubs to 1960s Peru, but they all conjure new perspectives from the past.
Still so much of that uncertainty we felt two years ago remains, especially as the South faced turning point elections. Hope doesn’t just happen; it requires action and energy with no guarantee it will be returned. Although many of these albums these ever-relevant records remind us to try — to look for the beauty even in ugly circumstances, look at the familiar or taken-for-granted from a different angle, give into joy no matter how short-lived, and to just get out there and dance.
Maybe an opening verse from our favorite album of 2022 says it all: “The world is changing / You can't reverse it / The truth is with you / You can't rehearse it / Pretend to know it /
It's time to live it / That's how you show it / Baby, we're in it.”
We’re in it with you, too.
The Bitter Southerner Crew
Home: Athens, Georgia
Undoubtedly, the range of Emily Braden’s voice impresses the most on For the Birds — from her upbeat, raucous drawl on “Takin’ U 4 a Ride,” to the uneasy, chilling dissonance on “Feel It All the Time” and the gentle, longing harmonies on “Haunting.” Still, the shapeshifting never feels jarring, and each transition seems to pull us deeper into the daze. Spellbinding soundscapes magpied together with chirps, rickety piano keys, music boxes, gentle horns, children shouting, and eerie vocal melding make for the perfect nest to cradle her timbre.
Favorite track: “Takin’ U 4 a Ride”
Home: Lawrenceville, Georgia
It's haunting to hear the late Takeoff explain in “Two Infinity Links” that he’d envisioned rap success since he was a child. With how Quavo and Takeoff — two-thirds of Migos, "Unc" and "Phew" — act as a formidable tag team, they clearly never saw this album as Take’s last. Migos’ quiet, precision-minded member was murdered at a Houston bowling alley earlier this year at just 28 years old.
Favorite track: “To the Bone”
Home: San Marcos, Texas
From the way they function more like a creative agency than a rap group to their relentlessly genre-defying output, BROCKHAMPTON continues to be one of hip-hop’s most fascinating acts. But, alas, during this year’s Coachella performance, BROCKHAMPTON announced what many of its loyal following had anticipated already: Its final album was ahead. On The Family’s 17 tracks, Kevin Abstract serves as the sole and final narrator. It’s as though he’s the last one to leave the house everyone else has already moved out of. But luckily, he leaves some heavy-hitting parting reflections as he turns out the lights and locks the door.
Favorite track: “All That”
Home: Washington, D.C.
The last record to come out of storied Inner Ear Studio in Arlington, Virginia, a studio called the Abbey Road of D.C.’s punk scene, Careening carries on the legacy of the bands that recorded there, like Minor Threat, Bad Brains, and, most directly, Fugazi — frontman Ian MacKaye produced the record while his brother Alec MacKaye pulls vocal duty for Hammered Hulls. Alongside Alec, Wild Flag’s Mary Timony plays bass, Mark Cisneros on guitar, and Titus Andronicus drummer Chris Wilson. Thrashing and utilitarian, their songs seem to meet the fury so many feel over the state of the country, so many of the decisions about which are made not far from where this music was.
Favorite track: “Rights and Reproduction”
Home: St. Petersburg, Florida
It’s telling that when Rod Wave interpolates his favorite Ed Sheeran song, “U.N.I,” Sheeran's words could be mistaken for his own. Between tour stops, as he searches for love that can compare to his first, this No. 1-selling artist has never sounded this hopelessly romantic on what he calls his last “sad ass” album.
Favorite track: “Yungen” feat. Jack Harlow
Home: Dallas and Paris, France
A summer surprise, jazz virtuosos DOMi and JD Beck seemed as if beamed down from another planet this past summer as they released their debut, NOT TiGHT, on Apeshit, a Blue Note imprint by Anderson .Paak, (also one half of Silk Sonic). Many saw them for the first time on NPR’s Tiny Desk in August with 22-year-old French DOMi in Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century pigtails playing a keyboard similarly toned to the one in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 19-year-old Dallas drummer JD Beck tapping out impossibly intricate patterns — all in a garden’s worth of fake flowers. A student of fellow Texans producer Jah Born, drummer Cleon Edwards, Snarky Puppy’s Robert “Sput” Searight, Beck has been gigging and touring since he was a preteen — a supernatural talent that attracted legendary pianist Herbie Hancock to perform on NOT TiGHT along with other guests like Thundercat, Mac DeMarco, and Busta Rhymes.
Favorite track: “SMiLE”
Home: Birmingham
Drive into Birmingham’s Woodlawn neighborhood, and follow the scent of palo santo to find Duquette Johnston, who will more than likely be sporting a pair of Stan Ray painter pants and selling one of his original design tees to a customer inside his shop, palo sticks smoldering at the register where his towhead son Tennessee often sits on weekends. Club Duquette, which he co-owns with his painter wife, Morgan, serves as a serene harbor for locals and neighborhood high school students, but it also reflects the positive energy Johnston seeks now after a much more frenetic era. A founding member of Verbena, Johnston toured with major acts like Foo Fighters and The Strokes, but he left the group right before they signed to Capitol Records and wound up in Etowah County Jail in north Alabama on a drug charge, with a novel’s worth of harrowing stories on the other side. He’s always made music since his release and move back to Birmingham, but Social Animals gathers the long view of that time and layers it with his and Morgan’s fraught but fulfilled journey in parenthood. Haunting, swirling, and soaring, this work envelops you just like smoke from a piece of holywood given time to cure.
Favorite track: “Whiskey and the Wine”
Home: Durham, North Carolina, and Richmond, Virginia
There’s a generous overlap between the Venn-diagram circles joining subscribers to the Kitchen Table Speculator, the e-newsletter from Hiss Golden Messenger frontman M.C. Taylor, and fans of free jazz (think Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, and Alabama-born Sun Ra). But while the 34-minute, four-song instrumental trip feels tailor-made for Hiss heads, Revelators draws a sound bath anyone with an open mind can ease into. The “loose outfit” that includes producer and Spacebomb Records bassist Cameron Ralston formed in the upside-down of lockdown as a way to twist an emotional deadbolt. “I could see the emotion I was wanting to get at, but I didn't have the right color paint to get there,” wrote Taylor in his newsletter. “So I asked Cameron if he would join me on the trip. … I knew he'd get what I was talking about even though there were no words.” The first track, “Grieving,” opens as a dirge and descends into a riot of sax and organ, a voiceless commentary on the violence innate to the American condition. But by the end there are hope-filled flickers in Taylor’s guitar tone, strings meandering off to a skyline that drummer JT Bates’ beat urges a march toward.
Favorite track: “George the Revelator”
Staff Pick: Lolo Reskin, Sweat Records (Miami)
“In an international city like Miami, we sell all kinds of music, and Boleros Psicodélicos is one of those special albums that our whole staff heartily recommended this year. Whether you’re into Celia Cruz, J Dilla, Khruangbin, or vintage soundtracks, you’ll appreciate these slinky down-tempo Latin American vibes with fantastic guest vocalists across the album.”
Home: Austin
It was love at first listen for Black Pumas’ Adrian Quesada when he heard “Esclavo y Amo,” released by the Peruvian band Los Pasteles Verdes in 1975, over his car’s AM radio while driving around Austin. Quesada was so taken with the romantic acid ballad, he had to pull over before the song was over. That psychedelic bolero sound would eventually lead Quesada to compose his own album dedicated to the border-crossing Latin American genre and the time it flourished. Cinematic and dramatic, with elements of art pop, bossa nova, and organ-overdrive and harpsichord-heavy psych rock (reminiscent of Kenny Rogers’ “Just Dropped In” or The Association’s “Never My Love”), the full scope of balada music unfurls like a telenovela over Boleros Psicodélicos through Quesada’s arrangements (both original and covers), plus a cavalcade of guest performers from Calle 13’s iLE to Gabriel Garzón-Montano.
Favorite track: “Ídolo”
Home: Adel, Georgia
From boutique hotel lobbies to natural wine bars, Robert Lester Folsom’s “My Stove’s on Fire” and “Written in Your Hair” perpetually pop up on playlists in places far from the South Georgia singer-songwriter’s hometown of Adel and long after he recorded them. As a 20-something in the ’70s, Folsom honed a small but shimmering trove of songs with the help of college classmates, his sisters, and pals, but the furthest the radio waves carried his music was just over the state line to Florida. Folsom’s artistic aspirations eventually gave way to paying bills, and he started painting houses full time. Decades later, crate-digger-loved label Mexican Summer reissued his 1976 album Music and Dreams, and Folsom found his groovy, cosmic, folk-rock shone in a new light for an audience he could have never fathomed. This year, the label released a new collection of his previous work, Sunshine Only Sometimes, which sounds akin to what George Harrison might have made if he’d lived near the Okefenokee Swamp instead. Put to tape on a reel-to-reel in bedrooms, a motel room, and a barn, these songs have his pickup-truck-cruising grooves, but they also reveal a more tenderhearted Folsom — one who yearns for companionship, clarity, and contentment. How beautiful that his feelings of being lost have been found.
Favorite track: “Ease My Mind”
Home: Durham, North Carolina
Born of Nick Sanborn’s electronica and Amelia Meath’s Appalachian choral group Mountain Man, the biodynamic, organic roots of Sylvan Esso’s original stomping beat pop are exposed on No Rules Sandy, recorded at their Durham-based studio Betty’s — just one outcropping of the ecosystem they’ve introduced to the Triangle, which now includes a label named Psychic Hotline, and ballpark-based microfestival they called “The Greatest Show on Dirt.”
Favorite track: “Echo Party”
Home: Houston and Bamako, Mali
Houston’s Khruangbin has come to represent a musical manifestation of their hometown’s international heritage (the city is one of the country’s most diverse). With West African blues already part of the constellation of global reference points in their work, their collaboration with Malian artist Vieux Farka Touré, the Hendrix of the Sahara, sounds magically meant-to-be. A collection of covers, the album reinterprets the canon of Vieux’s father, the massively influential Ali Farka Touré, who conjured the hypnotic grooves of Delta blues, especially John Lee Hooker, within older Saharan traditions. These live takes feel more moody, softly lit, and hazy than Ali’s originals, as if they’ve been put through a slow-jam extruder, but they’re just as mesmerizing — gentle reminders of Ali’s brilliance.
Favorite track: “Diarabi”
Home: Oologah, Oklahoma
In 2019, a cellphone video of Zach Bryan belting “Heading South” beside a campfire outside his U.S. Navy barracks went viral. In the years since, he’s made two albums while remaining an active-duty sailor — a role he knows well from his father, who was stationed in Japan when Bryan was born. He enlisted himself at just 17 years old. Last year, six months after his Grand Ole Opry debut, the Navy honorably discharged him after eight years of service to allow him to pursue his music and sign a deal with Warner Records. After the release of American Heartbreak, Bryan told The New York Times, “I’m, like, a Kerouac guy. … Like, I think life is reckless and it should be insane. It all ends in agony. It’s all about the outcome, so like, do it, you know? Do whatever it is.” Much like the way Jack Kerouac typed out On the Road on a 120-foot scroll, Bryan strummed out a two-hour-long, 34-track ramble that still manages to preserve his honest, rough-hewn edges in textured details like “The subtle cloud around you from my last cigarette” in “Sun to Me” and on “Something in the Orange,” where he pleads, “Take me back to us dancing, this wood used to creak.”
Favorite track: “Something in the Orange”
Staff Pick: Dan Drinkard, Seasick Records (Birmingham)
“My friend Cash Langdon suggested I check out Boat Songs while we were waiting on veggie burgers from the Travis Chicago Style food truck outside of Saturn in Birmingham. The Molina influence combined with basketball lyrical references had me hooked instantly. Seeing MJ live this past fall cemented it as one of my favorite albums of 2022.”
Home: Asheville, North Carolina
MJ Lenderman’s Boat Songs listens like it’s roaring out of a transistor radio in a low-slung garage workshop, a kind of nostalgic distortion that belies the Wednesday guitarist’s 23 years. Like a Gen-Z J. Mascis, Lenderman puts a twangy take on ’90s noise rock with tallboy-talk lines about Michael Jordan’s flu game and his daddy seeing quarterback Dan Marino in a Harris Teeter. But through the fuzz, there’s somehow plenty of patina on the arrangements and an aching sincerity in the simplicity of the scenes he describes, like great Grit Lit or a Patterson Hood-penned ballad.
Favorite track: “You Have Bought Yourself a Boat”
Home: Birmingham & Austin
No one can accuse Katie Crutchfield, aka Waxahatchee, of not giving her fans what they want. After a pandemic-prolonged album release and tour cycle around her 2021 watershed work St. Cloud (another indie-gone-country crossover but undoubtedly the best of the bunch), the Birmingham-born singer-songwriter announced a new side-project tour before her current one had even ended. Alongside Austin daughter Jess Williamson, she debuted their group Plains and the song “Problem With It” with a dizzying, dazzling desert road trip video, the two on a less tragic Thelma and Louise-esque trip through West Texas. It heralded a return to wide open spaces for the two, with the album leaning further into the ’90s country muses for St. Cloud. The girls are all here, The Chicks, Lucinda, Linda, Trisha, and Emmylou, minus the smoothed-out pop production with Crutchfield’s lip-curling lines and Williamson’s slightly shattered crystalline voice.
Favorite track: “Line of Sight”
Home: Atlanta
The winning moments in JID’s third album are sneaky but have terrific payoff, like when an Aretha Franklin sample made famous by Yasiin Bey foreshadows a guest verse from the veteran artist himself. Yet being arrested with all six of his siblings for a club brawl becomes a cherished memory the longer and farther tour buses keep him from home. No matter what his career has both afforded and cost him, JID makes it impossible not to anticipate the next chapter.
Favorite track: “Surround Sound” (feat 21 Savage and Baby Tate)
Home: Murray, Kentucky
Like so many Southern musicians, lifelong Kentuckian S.G. Goodman learned to sing at the knee of the old ladies lining her church pew. But on that traditional foundation Goodman has constructed songs about a different way of living in and thinking about the South (where queer country and folk narratives like hers are blessedly easier to find). Her voice, gravelly like Lucinda Williams’ yet shimmery like Michael Stipe’s, mesmerizes on its own, but Goodman’s lyrics tell stories of addiction, small-town life, “gas station delicacies,” religion, and rural economics without a pittance of pretension — perhaps owed to the special brand of Faulkner-esque bravery it takes to write publicly about the people and places you see every day. It’s honest work that means so much.
Favorite track: “Patron Saint of the Dollar Store”
Home: Houston
The stratosphere may be the only limit to Beyoncé’s power, but even still, on her latest compendium, Renaissance, she reminds us, “I'm the bar. Alien superstar.” Despite her global preeminence, B never misses a chance to remind the world that she was born of the Gulf Coast. Somehow six years have passed since New Orleans bounce queen Big Freedia bridged the first single from Beyonce’s pop music paradigm shift Lemonade with the line “I like cornbread and collard greens, bitch. You besta believe it.” Here, B brings her back on Renaissance’s first drop, “Break My Soul,” which heralded a record that ebbs and flows like a steamy set at the club. A devotional to death drops and house music, Renaissance’s register feels due in part to Atlanta’s RuPaul, who has mainstreamed underground parts of queer and drag culture into everyday American conversation. The South twirls around heavy Brooklyn and Chicago influences on the floor from “American Has a Problem,” which samples Atlanta rapper Kilo Ali, to the gospel backdrop of “Church Girl.”
Favorite track: “Cuff It”
Home: Atlanta
Each song in “Ghetto Gods” serves as a tender dedication to the loan borrowers, water boys, strong friends, and stressed-out weed smokers from our daily lives. “Check in on your strong friends,” they implore at the end of the album. “I’m here if you feel like talkin’.” No matter what they may face, or what their hustle looks like, Olu and WowGr8 make sure to recognize them for the deities they truly are.
Favorite track: “WATERBOYZ”
Staff Pick: David Swider, End of All Music (Oxford & Jackson, Mississippi
“I bought this album twice: one on vinyl for the home stereo and one on CD for my truck. The record seems made for these times — a record that can fit any moment. Dawn’s New Orleans roots aren’t as present here as her last album, Second Line, but her talent is on full display, and it’s amazing to see her totally own the neoclassical world of modern avant-garde music.”
Home: New Orleans & New York City
Almost like shrinking to a few millimeters tall to wander around a painter’s palette like a spectral canyon through stratified gradients of oil colors, Pigments blends Dawn Richard’s vocal brushstrokes into the textures laid out in landscape by multi-instrumentalist Spencer Zahn. A synesthetic track listing — “Vantablack,” “Cerulean,” “Saffron,” “Crimson” — kaleidoscopes a crayon box of genres from jazz to electronica, classical to R&B, that listen like a futuristic Joni Mitchell jam. Richard’s voice seems so sacred to this kind of intentionally crafted space that it’s almost jarring to remember that her voice was first heard through much more commercially marketed endeavors like the group Danity Kane and the Diddy - Dirty Money mixtapes. In a time when the cogs and wheels of the music industry feel more clunky than ever, it’s a stunning surprise to have a piece of work like this framed before us.
Favorite track: “Umber”
Home: Overland Park, Kansas, by way of Texas and Oklahoma
A Midwesterner in Memphis, Kevin Morby set up shop in Room 409 at the eerily empty Peabody Hotel in the immediate post-lockdown to bring the songs on This Is a Photograph into focus. Each one adjusts the aperture of the city, often into the foreground on songs like “Disappearing” and “A Coat of Butterflies,” odes to Jeff Buckley featuring the Mississippi River lapping at the banks. There’s also “Rock Bottom,” reminiscent of Goner Records’ Jay Reatard, or the title track, where the chorus rings out through the voices of backup singers from Stax Music Academy. But sometimes it sits fuzzy in the background as a distinctly well-suited “window to the past” to ruminate on ghosts, dreams, and the layers of time. Spurred by a health scare with his father, the album shows Morby trying to find his place in overlapping timelines and questioning whether death really delegates past and present. But while cosmogonal uncertainty underpins This Is a Photograph, the album firmly grounds the prolific Morby as one of his generation’s most recognizable, inventive artists.
Favorite track: “This Is a Photograph”
Home: Asheville, North Carolina
Singer-songwriter Angel Olsen’s eighth record marks a testament to the invincibility that follows profound grief and how it can open up a sky of possibility over the darkest valley. Emboldened by the pain of losing both her parents shortly after stepping into a new future as an openly queer person in the midst of the pandemic, Olsen went into the studio to make Big Time without the preparation she typically carries, but with a vulnerability that lights up even the record’s most somber moments. These songs also mark a shift in sound for Olsen toward the country stylings of Townes Van Zandt, Dolly Parton, Lee Hazlewood, and Nancy Sinatra — swelling strings, bursts of horns, dreamy piano chords, and runs of lap steel hung like a garland over her words. “I felt the change and it came back around / Then I moved into the feeling I found,” she sings in “Through the Fires.” “And the feeling I found showed me how I could lose / To love without boundary and put it to use.” This is Olsen’s metaphysical honky-tonk; she’s loaded the jukebox and dancing for no witnesses.
Favorite track: “All the Good Times”