When I try to catch up on what music I missed in the last year, I take a weekend for research reading year-end best-of lists, review large lists of major releases, hop on various Spotify lists to find new popular and heralded songs to add to my pile of songs I've found on my own.
Here's the thing. I feel like I've completed my long-running phase of aging out of the popular music zeitgeist. I think I'm grandpa now. Which is a bad thing to admit as someone who plays music in public and writes original music albums and some music score for film and tv.
OK, but here's the real thing: I think I have some reasonable quibbles with the songs lauded by music critics on Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, NPR and all of the other usual suspects. I'm just not hearing a lot of music in the music I'm hearing; if I could define "music" as catchy melodies or interesting beats. Non-RZA hip-hop seems to be regressing to simple loops. Indie is starting to get low-fi and abandon melody. I really wanted to like the new Bjork album - but good god, I just can't. Florence and the Machines seems to have a knack to take 5 interesting lyrical and musical ideas and mash them together into something boring.
That Said
All of my gripes above are just a gut reaction to just "tolerating" most of the best-of songs instead of "liking" them. It's a bummer.
However, the truth is that there is always a ton of exciting music out there for everybody. It just can take a lot of time to find it. This Spotify list I created below are my favorites that I can find from 2022 for now. As always, I'll really find my 2022 favorites over the course of the next ten years.
Meanwhile, these songs are the ones that I find exciting immediately. I'm placing a premium on melody, chords and rhythm a lot more than just attitude, energy, or lyrical subject matter.
Enjoy
Enough of my yakking. Here's what I've dug up so far. Enjoy what you will.
NOTE: You might need to log into Spotify in this browser to be able to play full songs from this post below. Or just use the link to play the playlist within Spotify.
EDIT - May 6, 2023: Apologies to anyone inconvenienced when this playlist was inadvertently deleted earlier this year. We just re-made the playlist and included it here.
