The 17 most anticipated albums of 2022

There’s never enough Big Thief. Even when the band announces a new double LP, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, our general reaction is, “Eh, could’ve been a triple album.” We kid, but only a little. Singer Adrian Lenker’s two solo albums from last year were fantastic, as were the two records the group put out in 2019. If anything, the double LP strategy seems more like a “let’s go ahead and get it out of the way, we’re always bursting at the seams with great material” admission. And the band’s results—beautifully lush Americana—bear it out.

Shamir has always had different layers to his music, but there seems to be a radical directness coming from the artist with his upcoming record, Heterosexuality. From the titles to the lyrics, Shamir is explicitly grappling with queerness and identity in a much rawer, more potent way than on past releases. Couple that with music that incorporates some industrial flourishes with fragile melodies, and you’ve got a record worth focusing on.

If that’s not a Spiritualized album title, then nothing is. Album opener “Always Together With You” explicitly hearkens back to J Spaceman’s classic Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space, with a woman’s crackling radio voice announcing the title as the track begins, before the slowly looping instrumentation and vocal patterns emerge, building to wonderfully cathartic release, albeit sunnier than usual. But that’s quite a sliding scale of emotion: This is an act that doesn’t do small measures. It’s bombastic in the best way.

We’re never going to not be excited about a new Superchunk album. The North Carolina indie rockers have been crushing it since returning in 2010 with with the subsequent decade seeing albums largely as good as anything from their first 10 years. First single “Endless Summer” has a mellower vibe than 2018’s fiery , more reminiscent of , but its hooky guitar riff and ace melodies promise great things from the full-length.

Charli XCX managed to create one of the (not to mention, one of the more compelling musical documents of life during quarantine) with the crowdsource-enabled How I’m Feeling Now. Her next album, CRASH, looks to be a much glitzier affair. As teased by the assist of Caroline Polachek and Christine And The Queens on recent single “New Shapes,” it, too, is a collaboration-heavy effort—only this time with fellow pop stars instead of the public.

Phife Dawg’s long-awaited posthumous release is finally seeing the light of day. The Tribe Called Quest rapper passed away in 2016, but the band’s one-time manager Dion Liverpool has been patiently assembling this collection of tracks with the blessing of Phife’s estate. There’s been little more than released last year, but this is a must-hear record for any fan of the group.

The former White Stripe has actually announced two upcoming solo albums for 2022. Entering Heaven is due out July 21, but Fear Of The Dawn will arrive three months earlier. The initial single, “Taking Me Back,” is a little corny with its blues-riffing-meets-industrial vibes, but the alternate version he subsequently put out, with its Appalachian bluegrass sound, was much more promising. Regardless of which direction he skews, these promise to be fascinating releases from the ever-busy artist.

When Bloc Party announced that upcoming album Alpha Games would be a back-to-basic affair, the band wasn’t fucking around. Lead single “Traps” is a roiling burst of propulsive post-punk, with the off-beat hi-hat rhythm and singer Kele Okereke’s insistent declamations riding over it all. It’s been five years since the underwhelming minimalism of ; it seems the intervening half-decade has once again lit a fire under the four-piece. Good.

God Don’t Make Mistakes, the upcoming Shady Records debut from Griselda rapper Conway The Machine, has been teased for so long now (it was first announced back in 2019), that it’s acquired a bit of mystical sheen. Yes, there was , but while we have , he hasn’t released a note of it yet. Still, coming from the prolific artist who put out three full-length releases in 2020 and two more this year—with nary a dip in quality—this should be a behemoth when it finally drops.

Okay, yes, we’ve been fooled before. My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields said back in 2018 that the band would be releasing two new albums within the year; needless to say, those didn’t materialize. But during the many 30th anniversary tributes to the group’s landmark Loveless this year, the band members about getting new music out there—specifically, one album of “warm and melodic” material, the other much more experimental. Considering the 22 years between Loveless and , we expect Shields to take his time.

It’s been seven long years since Sky Ferreira last put out an album, and two years since her last new music—the single “”—so it’s understandable that fans are a little skeptical that something new is forthcoming. But recently, to assure everyone that new music from the L.A. musician should be forthcoming in 2022. If she continues fusing synth-pop with bleak indie rock so powerfully, it should be well worth the wait.

There’s almost no chance 2022 comes and goes without a new Arcade Fire record. Last year, singer Win Butler “two or three” albums’ worth of music for the band during lockdown, and they were supposedly in the studio during late 2020. That all points to a long-delayed follow-up to 2018’s . Honestly, we wouldn’t mind a little less disco on this one.

The ebullient dance pop of Kim Petras has long moved out of the realm of guilty pleasure into pure pleasure, an artist who unabashedly embraces the gleeful silliness of pop-music structures to deliver sugar rushes of uptempo bops. There’s no release date yet (or title) for her forthcoming 2022 album, but if “My Coconuts”—an uproariously absurd slice of disco funk that gives “My Humps” a run for its money in the mastery of the single entendre—is any indication, Petras is just waiting for the right moment to strike. Our guess is summertime.