Check This Out!'s Top Ten Albums of 2022

The best of the best featuring Weyes Blood, patchnotes, billy woods, Brothertiger, Alvvays, Angel Olsen, Garcia Peoples, Animal Collective, The Beths, and Daniel Avery.

Dec 20, 2022

Welcome to the third annual Check This Out! Top Ten Albums of the Year!

The year-end selection process is something that I always hope is easier than the last, but after shuffling through forty excellent records, this final ten is the most stacked yet, and ranking them is a fool’s errand.

I want to take a minute to talk about the two records at the summit of 2022’s listenings. With Weyes Blood’s Titanic Rising as my top pick in 2019, it’s no secret that In the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, the second album in Natalie Mering’s trilogy, was the one thing I knew I had to hear this year. As expectations don’t always meet reality, I’m happy to report In the Darkness, Hearts Aglow is even more of a triumph than I was hoping for when it was announced earlier this summer. It’s a gorgeously complex masterpiece that rewards the listener for returning to it repeatedly.

At the same time, I cannot help but return to this newsletter’s original mission of mining indie gems outside the algorithm. While Mering and her Weyes Blood outfit are by no means household names, the album is distributed by Sub Pop, the most prominent “indie” label in the game, and the record has undoubtedly benefited from a successful publicity blitz over the past few months. Mering’s message for the times is essential, and it pleases me to no end to see a tender singer-songwriter baroque pop record gain well-deserved attention when this is most certainly not what the general public is listening to in 2022.

On the other end of the scale is patchnotes’ Golden Hour, a gorgeously atmospheric electronic record that operates within a niche space. Rooted in chillwave and vaporwave, Golden Hour expands beyond the borders and expectations of these genres, relatively new and celebrating their first decade while still having room to be entirely moldable. Kyle Schwendinger, who performs as patchnotes, does this with ease. Golden Hour is a record that takes its time, as slow-burning climaxes occasionally lift beyond the dreamy haze with stunning results.

When Golden Hour was released all the way back in January, I tapped out a few sentences as an Instagram post for a review with no clue as to how many times I would listen to this record over the next twelve months. Its obvious standout single, “Baby,” is probably my favorite song of the year, if I have to choose, and is the driver to returning to bask in the Golden Hour. But after endless spins, I’ve found that the irresistible early nineties-influenced woodwinds sample that drives the song is but one chapter, and true bliss is found when Golden Hour is soaked up in its entirety.

Golden Hour and patchnotes found a home on Pacific Plaza Records, a genuinely independent electronic label out of California that relies on their ravenous fanbase. PPR’s limited physical media runs typically sell out quickly, and not because of billboards, print ads, and PR tours. Instead, it’s good old-fashioned word-of-mouth recommendations, now found on social media. This notion is what truly excites me, as I found out about Golden Hour this way and have passed it on with endless endorsements to friends and readers who are now also patchnotes fans. The album’s endurance this year has led to PPR revisiting Golden Hour with a new remaster and fantastic remixes by other artists mentioned in the newsletter many times (I include Soft Replica’s take on “Homage” as one of the songs you must hear, as it’s that good).

While completely different in their musical offerings and approach, I view Golden Hour and In the Darkness, Hearts Aglow as the essential bookends to a massive year filled to the brim with outstanding records. They deserve to be celebrated for distinct reasons, which is why I’m naming them as my top two AOTYs.

To close out the top three, there is no one else in the hip-hop game like billy woods, who continues to push the genre with intricate storytelling. Combine this with the leftfield beats and instrumentation found on Aethiopes, and everything else in the genre sounds downright pedestrian.

Thank you so much for reading and making this the best year yet for Check This Out! I’ll be back in your inbox after the new year. In the meantime, I appreciate all my subscribers, both paid and free. If you haven’t yet, please consider signing up here.

Miss an earlier entry in the year-end list? No problemo:

12 Favorite EPs of 2022 w/ Barry Can’t Swim, Pastel, Cold Atlantic, Donny Benét, Jacques Greene, Soshi Takeda, Matthieu Faubourg, Luxury Noise, NewDad, KaySoul, TOPS, and Weather Underground.

50 Favorite Albums of 2022 Part One w/ Artsick, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, Brandon Coleman, Bonobo, Spoon, Big Thief, Tony Molina, Cool Maritime, Marci, and Sean Thompson's Weird Ears.

50 Favorite Albums of 2022 Part Two w/ Julian Fulco Perron, Built to Spill, Yumi Zouma, Coast to Coast Collective, Vince Staples, Kikagaku Mayo, Erin Rae, Goose, Tourist, and Laura Veirs.

50 Favorite Albums of 2022 Part Three w/ Kids On a Crime Spree, John Carroll Kirby, Kevin Morby, Cate Le Bon, Denzel Curry, Trick Mist, Sharon Van Etten, Marco Benevento, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Brothertiger.

50 Favorite Albums of 2022 Part Four w/ Sea Power, Stars, Deserta, Kurt Vile, HAAi, Tim Heidecker, Panda Bear & Sonic Boom, Uni Boys, Confidence Man, and Open Mike Eagle.

The playlist is complete with three songs from each AOTY candidate. At over 10 hours and 150 songs, there’s something for everyone. Hit that shuffle button and dive in!

Listen on Apple Music 🎧

What’s your favorite album of 2022? Let me know in the comments!

10. Daniel Avery - Ultra Truth

What I said in my review: A grooveable record with no interest in hanging at the club, for every floor-filling moment like “Wall of Sleep” that features newsletter new favorite HAAi offering heavenly vocals over synths and a skull-crushing foundation, there’s a slower, atmospheric comedown gives pause to the trek. Perhaps no song demonstrates this idea more than “Overflowing With Escape,” the auditory equivalent of being crushed by a wave under layers of compressed distortion. The listener is forced to confront the track’s heaviness, but there’s beauty in staying in the demanding moment.
Ultra Truth is one of those albums that skirts description, instead begging to be experienced with a fully devoted ear. Daniel Avery crafts a moment that gloriously combines electronic music with pure humanity… An auditory encounter between the building atmosphere of the title track and the leftfield beauty of “Lone Swordsman,” it’s a sampler of the diversity of Ultra Truth, one of the year’s best electronic albums and well worth exploring.

Songs Ya Gotta Hear: Ultra Truth, Lone Swordsman, Chaos Energy (featuring Kelly Lee Owens & HAAi).

Ultra Truth is available on Mute.

09. The Beths - Expert In a Dying Field

What I said in my review: Let’s get this out of the way - “Expert in a Dying Field,” the title track from The Beths’ newest record, is one of the year's greatest singles. Opening with Benjamin Sinclair’s fuzzed-out bass and the melodic interplay between Elizabeth Stokes and Jonathan Pearce’s guitars, the song moves into a sweet chorus of harmonies. At the same time, Stokes asks, “How does it feel?/To be an expert in a dying field?/And how do you know?/It’s over when you can’t let go?” before bursting into an exuberant finish that counteracts the melancholy subject matter of the end of a relationship.
…The Beths find themselves in an evergrowing and overcrowded bedroom pop scene that has yielded lesser returns for the last few years, according to yours truly (I keep things friendly around here, but if you know me, you have a pretty good idea of who I’m talking about). The problem with the genre as of late is falling victim to filling records with forgettable lulls, but none of this idea is found on Expert in a Dying Field. Sure, things stay comfortably mid-tempo, but the hooks are memorable and The Beths’ energy is infectious. Mid-album numbers like “Head in the Clouds,” “Best Left,” and “Change in the Weather” work at their own comfortable pace but are pure sugar for those that love some classic indie rock. And maybe it’s the Crash Test Dummies album I’ve been spinning in my car all week, but “When You Know You Know” and “A Passing Rain” would fit nicely on a 1994 mixtape.

Songs Ya Gotta Hear: Silence Is Golden, Head in the Clouds, Change in the Weather.

Expert In a Dying Field is available on Carpark Records.

08. Animal Collective - Time Skiffs

What I said in my review: Experimental indie icons Animal Collective are back, and they sound pretty damn good while staring at the beginning of their third decade. Confronting middle age, parenthood, and modern worries, the Baltimore band sounds as comfortable as they have been in ten years. One could chalk up this notion to all four members playing a significant role on Time Skiffs, the first time the group has been complete since 2012’s uneven Centipede Hz.
Besides experimental synth work, harmonies are what make Animal Collective stand out, and Time Skiffs has them in spades. The lead single “Prester John” is as pastoral as anything from Fleet Foxes, but the shimmering synths and Avey Tare’s funked-up bass lift the song to a completely different indie pop arena. Time Skiffs’ nucleus is the seven-minute “Strung with Everything,” a song that starts with a dreamy soundscape before blossoming into the most tolerable Mike Love-led Beach Boys effort. Riffing on Martha and the Vandellas, Tare quips, “the summer’s here and the time is crying, it spent all year in your head,” and turns climate change into a love song for the end times.
The record starts with the hottest run of the year so far, through Scott Walker tribute, “Walker” and “Cherokee,” which finds Tare meditating on modern America and self-improvement while acknowledging the cultural appropriation in his mode of transportation. Time Skiffs tails out in its last quarter, which curbs the album away from perfection, but I may reevaluate that stance with more listens.

Songs Ya Gotta Hear: Prester John, Strung with Everything, Cherokee.

Time Skiffs is available on Domino Recording Co.

What I said in my review: When you’re a sextet rolling with three guitarists that are constantly walking the line between indie and the jam scene, things shouldn’t go as swimmingly as they do for New Jersey’s Garcia Peoples.
The band’s first outing as a six-piece came on 2020’s Nightcap at Wit’s End, their fourth record in their three-year recording history, with the addition of bassist Andy Cush and keyboardist Pat Gubler taking Garcia Peoples to hazy new heights. Their latest, Dodging Dues, sees the band tightening up the runtime and spreading the wealth with Cush and Gubler writing and singing their own pieces in addition to the band’s traditional songwriting lineup of guitarists Danny Arakaki, Tom Malach, and Derek Spaldo. The result is a phenomenal record that manages to cover immense ground in a little over thirty minutes.
…With the pace that Garcia Peoples records at, the band is probably already three concepts down the road from this record, but with Dodging Dues, there’s a real sense of a new phase for the band. By allowing each player to carve out their own piece of the pie, the group has avoided a jumbled mess and instead delivered their most accessible album yet.

Songs Ya Gotta Hear: False Company, Cold Dice, Tough Freaks.

Dodging Dues is available on No Quarter.

06. Angel Olsen - Big Time

What I said in my review: After the string-laden seriousness of 2019’s All Mirrors and its companion album Whole New Mess, Olsen looks to cosmic country wizard Jonathan Wilson and his Topanga Canyon studio. Inspired by Neil Young, Olsen and Wilson take an organic approach to the alt-country genre with a set full of pedal steel guitar and tacky barroom pianos, like on sweeping love song of the title track or outer atmosphere reach on the opener, “All The Good Times.”
I’ll be honest - as someone who has followed Olsen through her sterling career, All Mirrors was not my favorite work. The songs’ skeletons were good, but the synth and string section combo was too same-y throughout. Big Time retains a lot of the sweeping structures of that record, but trading Ashville for Los Angeles and bringing Wilson along for the ride makes the album shine. Even songs that could have fit on All Mirrors like “Go Home” stick a better landing as the strings swell similar to that Dublin band’s “All I Want Is You” or the intoxicating reflection of “Through The Fires.”
…Olsen’s Big Time is one of the more sincere records that you’ll hear this year - I haven’t enjoyed an Angel Olsen album this much since her indie-folk musings on Burn Your Fire for No Witness eight years ago.

Songs Ya Gotta Hear: All the Good Times, This Is How It Works, Go Home.

Big Time is available on Jagjaguwar.

05. Alvvays - Blue Rev

What I said in my review: The result may not have the immediate hookiness of early hits like “Archie, Marry Me” or “Not My Baby,” but have no fear as Blue Rev is just as intoxicating as the caffeinated alcopop the album is named after. Molly Rankin’s voice still anchors this set of songs, but the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants spirit suits Alvvays. Alec O’Hanley’s guitar melodies combine with Rankin’s rhythm parts to create an overdriven wall of sound on most of these tracks, sending the listener awash in a sea of distorted textures. Keyboardist Kerri MacLellan, the other piece to the remaining founding trio, deserves an award for “most improved.” MacLellan’s accents have always been a defining part of the Alvvays sound. Still, her stab at writing more, combined with Everett pulling her up in the mix, make her contributions undeniable, including the harmonies on “After the Earthquake.”
The secret sauce here is Riley and Blackwell, who add a fresh coat of pulsating paint to the slick Alvvays machine. Riley was already around when I saw them play in a Goodwill parking lot for the Underground Music Showcase in Denver over four years ago. Their energy gave a noticeable boost to the familiar indie classics from the band’s first two records, and the twosome slot perfectly into Blue Rev’s whirlwind attitude, even when the tempo slows down on new favorite numbers like “Many Mirrors” built around Riley’s swirling fills.

Songs Ya Gotta Hear: After the Earthquake, Many Mirrors, Belinda Says.

Blue Rev is available on Polyvinyl Records.

What I said in my review: Brothertiger’s Fundamentals, Vol. IV is that record I can’t stop recommending - no matter the person’s genre preferences, it’s the chilled-out electronic break everyone didn’t know they needed—the cure-all for the daily procession of shit.
…While the (Tears For Fears) covers are pretty damn great, it’s the Fundamentals series that shouldn’t slip under your radar. During quarantine, Jagos streamed improv sessions of free-flowing beat-making, and Fundamentals is the result. The four classical elements theme each volume, and fire is the final stop on Vol. IV. Though written and performed on the fly, there’s never evidence of phoning it in as each song flows from one to the next with stunning results.

Songs Ya Gotta Hear: Seamount, Kipuka, Laminar Flow.

Fundamentals Vol. IV is available on Satanic Panic.

03. billy woods - Aethiopes

What I said in my review: Best of the bunch is Aethiopes by the prolific New York rapper billy woods. Last heard working with Elucid as the long-running Armand Hammer on last year’s excellent Haram, here woods elects to collaborate with producer Preservation, who pulls samples from a global treasure trove to give the record its eerie undertones. It’s a fantastic pairing with woods lyrically exploring the scars of slavery, immigration, and ideas of both new and old Africa. At the same time, Preservation provides an almost hallucinogenic yet minimalist pallet full of traditional African percussion. The front half deliciously slithers, but Aethiopes' b-side keeps me coming back. Beginning with the claustrophobic Rembrandt album cover, there are references to Dutch colonialism throughout, and woods elects to give “Haarlem,” the Dutch settlement spelling for the neighborhood that would become Black America’s cultural mecca with erratic jazz sampling. The dubbed-out “Versailles” through closer “Smith + Cross” is one of the most captivating runs of the year, as each song flows to the next. If this universe of abstract hip-hop is your thing, you can’t miss the features on Aethiopes from Boldy James, Quelle Chris, El-P, and more. This is one that keeps giving - a complex record full of multiple timelines and narratives that will have you digging up something new with each listen.

Songs Ya Gotta Hear: Wharves, Versailles (featuring Despot), Protovangelium (featuring Shinehead).

Aethiopes is available on Backwoodz Studioz.

2. patchnotes - Golden Hour

What I said in my review: It’s a bummer the evenings have been in the single digits this week cos patchnotes' debut full-length, Goldenhour, is making me want a good sunset cocktail.

A spacey chillwave journey that’s sequenced perfectly, the smooth synths and beats hit a real spot for when you’re looking for an escape. While the latest single “Baby” is a great introduction, I dig the moodiness on “Iridescent,” and the collaborations with Luxury Noise (who also has a new EP out today) and Nightwlks are real highlights.

Songs Ya Gotta Hear: Sun, Baby, Homage (Soft Replica Remix).

Golden Hour is available on Pacific Plaza Records.

1. Weyes Blood - And In the Darkness, Hearts Aglow

What I said in my Headstuff review: And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow and its predecessor are the audio equivalents of a rare rainy day in a bygone Los Angeles, with California playing its own character in the Weyes Blood catalog. On “Grapevine,” Mering reaches for pure Americana, referencing James Dean’s end on Highway 46 on the Central Coast while yearning for a connection with her “emotional cowboy.”

The refreshingly retro album-oriented rock sound is partially thanks to Jonathan Rado of Foxygen, who continues his prolific production run by once again staffing the boards with Mering. There’s no better example of Rado’s stamp than the album centerpiece, ‘Hearts Aglow,’ which combines escapist lyrics and incredible vintage harmonies that transports the listener somewhere north of the Sunset Strip in the early 70s.

…Throughout the record, Mering plays with nostalgia while staying entirely modern in theme, and it’s in this way that the album excels. Mering’s warm embrace sounds like a familiar tune we know from a long-gone era that belonged to our parents and grandparents. At the same time, the topical lyrics make the album wholly contemporary and a snapshot of a world in burning flux.

Songs Ya Gotta Hear: Grapevine, Hearts Aglow, Twin Flame.

And In the Darkness, Hearts Aglow is available on Sub Pop.

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