8 June 2022

Influential and highly-praised American website Stereogum celebrates its 20th birthday this year. A lot of festive stuff the world’s best music blog as they claim themselves waits in the pipeline.

But first their multi-musical-genre list of the 50 best albums of 2022 so far.

Chris DeVille (Editor): “Perhaps as a result of artists sitting on new music during the pandemic’s early phases and dumping it all on us at the same time, it was unusually difficult
to pare down the list to just 50 albums this time around. Both in terms of widely acclaimed consensus favorites and personally beloved sleeper picks, there have just been so many albums to love. At the moment, the following are the ones the Stereogum staff loves the most… any album scheduled to be released by June 30 was eligible for this list, so some of these records are from the future.”

– TOP 5 –

5. Mr. Moral & The Big Steppers by KENDRICK LAMAR

“Lamar is operating like only a few artists in pop history — a superstar at the height
of his powers confounding everyone’s expectations while trying to transcend his own.”

Stream here

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4. ‘Once Twice Melody’ by BEACH HOUSE

“Other albums of theirs might be more concise, but none is as impactful as this staggering showcase of the mystical energy that Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally have channeled since
the start of their career.”

Stream here…

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3. ‘Aethioples’ by BILLY WOODS

“There are underground rap titans all over Aethiopes — El-P, Boldy James, Quelle Chris — but the real meat is in hearing woods and Preservation dig deep into a culture that’s hostile to humanity in general and to Blackness in particular.”

Stream here…

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2. ‘MOTOMAMI’ by ROSALÍA

“MOTOMAMI represents a gear switch from arms-length storytelling to something more personal. It goes hardest when Rosalía plays with contradiction: in music, in gender, in
simply being a living human being. Metamorphosis never sounded so exciting.”

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1. ‘Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You’ by BIG THIEF

“After their phenomenal pair of 2019 albums, it was hard to believe Big Thief had anywhere to go but down, both creatively and in terms of the frothing hype surrounding them. And yet here they are with both their most acclaimed and accomplished collection of music yet. Big Thief don’t just prove they’re actually that good. They sound like they can do anything.”

Stream here…

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Here’s the FULL LIST