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Best Songs of 2022

Seventy tracks that identify, grapple with or simply dance away from the anxieties of yet another uncertain year.

A close portrait of Ice Spice, wearing a yellow top and hood in front of a white background. She has short curly orange hair and is looking off to the side.
Ice Spice’s “Munch (Feelin’ U)” introduces a new piece of slang. The track made all three of our critics’ lists this year.Credit...Edwig Henson

Full disclosure: There can’t be a definitive list of best songs — only a sampling of what any one listener, no matter how determined, can find the time to hear in the course of a year. For discovery’s sake, my list rules out the (excellent) songs on my favorite albums of the year, and it’s designed more like a playlist than a countdown or a ranking. Feel free to switch to shuffle.

Backed by implacable Afro-Caribbean drumming and Ibeyi’s vocal harmonies, the Puerto Rican rapper Residente defines America as the entire hemisphere, while he furiously denounces historical and ongoing abuses.

Thom Yorke of Radiohead — in a side project, the Smile — wonders, “What will become of us?” Prodded by a funky beat and pelted by staggered, syncopated guitar and bass notes, he can’t expect good news.

With Wilco picking and strumming like a string band, Jeff Tweedy spins a free-associative fable about elemental forces of life and death, leading into a brief but probing jam that reunites country and psychedelia.

The crisply flirtatious “Calm Down,” by the Nigerian singer Rema, was already a major African hit when Selena Gomez added her voice for a remix. He’s confident, she’s inviting — at least for the moment — and the Afrobeats syncopation promises a good time.

A plinking Minimalist pulse and a deft chamber-pop arrangement carry the Icelandic songwriter Emiliana Torrini through fond thoughts of hard-won but durable domestic stability.

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Thom Yorke, left, and Jonny Greenwood of the Smile performing at Usher Hall in Edinburgh in June. The band also includes the drummer Tom Skinner.Credit...Roberto Ricciuti/Redferns, via Getty Images

“Atemporal” (“Timeless”) is from “Ay!,” Lucrecia Dalt’s heady concept album about time, physicality and love. It’s a lurching bolero that dovetails lo-fi nostalgia with vaudeville horns and an electronically skewed sense of space.

The Nigerian superstar Burna Boy juggles regrets, justifications and resentments as he sings about a romance wrecked by career pressures, drawing nervous momentum out of a strumming, fluttering sample from Toni Braxton.

The tone is airy: unassuming piano chords; a high, naïve voice; a singsong melody. But in one of Aldous Harding’s least cryptic lyrics, she is trying to put the best face on a confusing breakup.

Madison Cunningham sings, wryly and fondly, about an opposites-attract relationship in a tricky, virtuosic tangle of guitar lines.

Adrianne Lenker’s wispy voice belies the visionary ambition — and ambiguity — of her lyrics. So does the way the band, not always in tune, cycles through four understated folk-rock chords, swerving occasionally into a bridge. It’s a love song with a backdrop of war and transformation, delivered like a momentary glimpse into something much vaster.

Somewhere between folk-rock plaint and short story, Margo Price sings about a pregnant woman at a clinic, with a hard-luck past and a tough decision to make.

Cool, fast, precise and merciless, the Bronx rapper Ice Spice dispatches a hapless suitor by designating him as a new slang word: “munch.”

Mixing a suave bossa nova with a tapping, stubbornly resistant cross-rhythm, Jamila Woods neatly underlines the ambivalence she sings about, as she ponders just how close she wants someone to get.

The cheerful lilt of Stromae’s “Mon Amour” is camouflage for the increasingly threadbare rationalizations of a compulsive cheater; he gets his comeuppance when Camila Cabello asserts her own freedom to fool around.

Giveon floats in a jealous limbo, hoping not to be exposed to hard truths. His voice is a baritone croon with an electronic penumbra, in a track that hints at old soul translated into ghostly electronics.

No fewer than three leading producers of amapiano, the patient, midtempo South African club style, collaborated on “Inhliziyo” (“Heart”), creating haunted open spaces for the South African singer and songwriter Nkosazana Daughter to quietly lament a heartbreak.

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The Nigerian star Burna Boy addresses the challenges of balancing a relationship with his growing career on “Last Last.”Credit...Ferdy Damman/EPA, via Shutterstock

Nothing feels entirely solid in this song: not Tinashe’s breathy vocals, not the beat that flickers in and out of the mix, not the hovering tones that only sketch the chords. But in the haze, she realizes, “You don’t deserve my love,” and she moves on.

Revenge arrives with cool fury over elegant, vintage-soul strings as Jessie Reyez makes clear that someone is definitely not getting a second chance.

Danielle Balbuena — the songwriter and producer who records as 070 Shake — overdubbed herself as a full-scale choir in “Web,” a pandemic-era reaction to the gap between onscreen and physical interaction. She wants carnality in real time, insisting, “Let’s be here in person.”

In an ultimatum carried by a stately crescendo of keyboards, Holly Humberstone reminds a partner who’s threatening to leave just how much she has already put up with.

“There Were Bells” contemplates the slow-motion cataclysm of global warming as an elegy and a warning, with edgeless, tolling sounds and a mournful melody as Brian Eno sings about the destruction no one will escape.

Is it love or capitalism? Caroline Polachek sings with awe-struck sweetness — and touches of hyperpop processing — against an otherworldly backdrop that incorporates electronics, tabla drumming and string sections, at once intimate and abstract.

In a wedding-ready, hymnlike ballad, Stormzy sings modestly and adoringly about a love at first sight that he intends to last forever.

A blunt four-on-the-floor thump might just be the least aggressive part of “Right to Riot” from the British Armenian musician Hagop Tchaparian, which also brandishes traditional sounds — six-beat drumming and the snarl of the double-reed zurna — and zapping, woofer-rattling electronics as it builds.

The first section of an album-length piece, “Shebang,” by the composer Oren Ambarchi, is a consonant hailstorm of staccato guitar notes, picked and looped, manipulated and layered, emerging as melodies and rejoining the ever-more-convoluted mesh.


There are plenty of ways to try out something new — fooling around with your friends, tossing off a casual but not careless experiment, disappearing so deeply into a feeling that you forget form altogether.

It was a great year for the Cardi B booster plan. Like Drake before her, she is an attentive listener and a seven-figure trend forecaster, as captured in these two cousin-like feature appearances. “Shake It” is as credible a drill song as a non-drill performer has yet made — Cardi’s verse is pugnacious and tart. And “Tomorrow 2,” with its big BFF energy, helps continue construction of a new pathway for female allyship in hip-hop.

Ice Spice is a gleefully patient rapper. On “Munch,” she pulls off a perfectly balanced tug of war between neg-heavy seduction and the affect of being utterly unbothered.

The trick of this catalog of a couple’s catastrophic collapse is that the arrangement never lets on that the circumstances are dire, but atop it, Bailey Zimmerman sings like he’s narrating a boxing match.

A non-song. A koan. A cry from beneath the ravenous eddies. A memory bubbling up from repression. A tractor beam. A stunt. A hopeful warble. A promise of infinite tomorrows.

Epically silly and epically debauched, “Girls” marks a return(?) of quasi(?)-electroclash(?), but, more pointedly, is a reminder of the perennial power of lust, sweat and arch eroticism.

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Cardi B didn’t put out a lot of her own music in 2022, but she showed up in a savvy selection of features.Credit...Mario Anzuoni/Reuters

The logical endpoint of the TikTok duet trend: one extended posse-cut version aggregating everyone’s labor into a lofi-beats-to-study-to forever loop. The wooden spoon provides.

From his arresting debut mixtape “Letter 2 My Brother,” a caustic and bleak pledge of revenge from the Lil Baby affiliate Lil Kee, who sing-raps as if in a trance of menace.

Another year, another casual calisthenics lesson from Cam’ron, the last avatar of the intricately economical style that dominated Harlem rap in the ’90s and remains staggering to observe.

The first song Yahritza Martinez wrote — at age 13 — was “Soy El Unico,” a defiantly sad retort from a discarded partner to the discarder that pairs the groundedness of Mexican folk music with a vocal delivery inflected with hip-hop and R&B.

This song began life as viral melancholy on TikTok, a brief portrait of someone stuck in the gravitational pull of a person who doesn’t deserve their care. The finished song is desolate but resilient, a hell of a plaint.

Most striking about “Cookie,” the best song from the debut EP by the impressive young K-pop girl group NewJeans, is its ease — no maximalism, no theater. Simply a cheerful extended metaphor over an updated take on the club-oriented R&B of a couple of decades ago, finished off with a tasteful Jersey club breakdown.

The student befriends the teacher. Both drop out for a life of partying, followed by self-reflection, followed by more partying.

Midwest emo as refracted through Southeastern parchedness under a filter of radio pop-rock, delivering devastating sentiment about the emptiness of the American dream and the hopelessness of those subject to its whims.

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Ethel Cain turns a critical eye on the American dream with her debut album, “Preacher’s Daughter.”Credit...Irina Rozovsky for The New York Times

You OK, bro?

One long ache about the one who’s slipping away: “Darlin’, I wish that you could give me some more time/To herd the whole sky in my arms/And release it when you’re mine.”

Luscious, indignant, scolding.

Two traditionalists at heart, each feeling out the outer boundaries of their appetite for risk while still honoring what the other can’t quite do.

Roll-call rap that bridges the early ’80s to the early ’20s, with a cadre of Memphis women reveling in filth and sass.

What is hip-hop to country music these days? A source of vocal inspiration? A place for experimentation? Close kin? Safe harbor?

The globe-dominating update of the Fireboy DML solo hit features bright seduction delivered with jaunty rhythm from Ed Sheeran.


Anxiety abounds in this modern world, and music is one surefire way to process it — or maybe, for a few minutes at a time, to escape from it. The songs on this list consider both options.

Conventional wisdom tells us that life is short, time flies and there are never enough hours in the day. But Alynda Segarra takes the long view on this elegiac, piano-driven hymn: “Rivers and lakes/And floods and earthquakes/Life on Earth is long.” As it progresses at its own unhurried tempo, the song, remarkably, seems to slow down time, or at least zoom out until it becomes something geological rather than selfishly human-centric. The thick haze of climate grief certainly hangs over the track (“And though I might not meet you there, leaving it beyond repair”) but its lingering effect is one of generosity and spaciousness, inspiring a fresh appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things.

Matty Healy, the gregarious leader of the British pop group the 1975, is rarely at a loss for words, but on the supremely catchy “Happiness,” infatuation leaves him tongue-tied: “My, my, my, oh/My, my, my, you.” Ultimately, though, the song becomes an ode to giving oneself over to forces beyond control: like love, the unknown or maybe just the groove — particularly the loose, sparkling atmosphere the band taps into here.

The moon is a disco ball and it orbits around Beyoncé on this commanding dance-floor banger, a studied but lived-in ode to ball culture and Afrofuturism. Like the rest of the remarkable “Renaissance,” the song’s focus flickers constantly from the individual to the collective, as Beyoncé’s braggadocious boasts of being No. 1, the only one, share space with her exhortations to find that unicorn energy within: “Unique, that’s what you are,” she intones regally, before a transcendent finale in which the song takes flight on a Funkadelic spaceship of its own making.

The melody keeps ascending to nervy, dangerous heights, like a high-wire walk without a net: “I know the cost of flight is landing,” Amanda Shires sings on this imagistic torch song, trilling like some newly discovered species of bird. The title is playfully provocative, but it takes a twist in the song’s final lyric, when Shires proclaims, “I know I can take it like … Amanda” — a fitting finale for such a singular song of self.

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Amanda Shires makes a strong statement on “Take It Like a Man,” also the name of her latest album.Credit...Eric Ryan Anderson for The New York Times

Rejoice, you who have suffered through “Look What You Made Me Do,”“Me!” and even “Cardigan”: For the first time in nearly a decade, Taylor Swift has picked the correct lead single. “Anti-Hero” is one of the high points of Swift’s ongoing collaboration with the producer Jack Antonoff: The phrasing is chatty but not overstuffed, the synthesizers underline Swift’s emotions rather than obscuring them and the insecurities feel like genuine transmissions from Swift’s somnambulant psyche. Prospective daughters-in-law, you’ve been warned.

Rosalía, smacking her gum, eyebrows raised, one hand on an exaggeratedly cocked hip: That’s the attitude, and this is its soundtrack. “Despechá” — abbreviated slang for spiteful — is a lighter-than-air, mambo-nodding dance-floor anthem, and an invitation to join the ranks of the Motomamis. As always, she makes pop perfection sound as easy as A-B-C.

Pusha T, is, as ever, part rap-poet and part insult comic on the razor-sharp “Diet Coke,” bending language to his will and laughing his enemies right out of the V.I.P. room: “You ordered Diet Coke — that’s a joke, right?”

“Fruity,” like the best hyperpop, is an anarchic affront to refinement and restraint, an ever-escalating blast of melodic delirium and warped excess. It’s a sugar rush, it’s brain-freeze-inducing, it’s recommended by zero out of 10 dentists. Turn it up loud.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs grow elegantly into their role as art-rock elders here, not just by slowing to a tempo as confidently glacial as the Cure’s “Plainsong,” but by placing a spotlight on the existential dread of the next generation. “Mama, what have you done?” Karen O sings, channeling the voice of a frightened child. “I trace your steps in the darkness of one/Am I what’s left?”

Grace Ives makes music of interiority, chronicling the liminal moments of her day when she’s by herself, daydreaming: “I hear the neighbors sing ‘Love Galore,’ I do a split on the kitchen floor,” goes the charming “Lullaby,” a passionately sung, welcoming invitation into her world.

The pandemic left many people isolated in their own heads, questioning their perceptions, feeling disconnected from a larger whole. The clarion-voiced Natalie Mering has written a soothing anthem for all those lost souls in the emotionally generous “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody”; its title alone is an offering of solace and sanity.

A bass line buzzes like a live wire, snaking continuously through this exorcism of anxiety. “The feeling comes so fast, and I cannot control it,” Florence Welch wails as if possessed, but she eventually finds her catharsis in the music itself: “For a moment, when I’m dancing, I am free.”

“I’m walking past him, he sniffing my breeze,” the rising star Ice Spice spits expeditiously on this unbothered anthem; before he can even process the insult, she’s gone.

A sparse palette from 40 — finger snaps, moody synth washes, light Afrobeats vibes — gives Drake plenty of room to explore his melancholy on this standout from the welcome left turn “Honestly, Nevermind.”

An aching, bittersweet meditation on the holiness of the everyday, and an expression of intimacy from one of indie rock’s most mysterious, and best, songwriters.

The one-time “Call Me Maybe” ingénue shows off a breezier and more mature side, as impressionistic production from Rostam Batmanglij helps her conjure California sunshine.

“You stay soft, get eaten — only natural to harden up,” Mitski sings on this sleek but deceptively vulnerable pop song, as her voice, fittingly, oscillates between icy cool and wrenching ardor.

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Drake takes a refreshing swerve into dance music with the songs on “Honestly, Nevermind.”Credit...Prince Williams/Wireimage, via Getty Images

Down is up and wrong is right in this topsy-turvy, tumbleweed-blown country rocker, on which a wizened Miranda Lambert sings like a woman who’s seen it all: “Pick a string, sing the blues, dance a hole in your shoes, do anything to keep you sane.”

Katie Crutchfield, better known as Waxahatchee, embraces her twang and her Alabama upbringing on this collaboration with the Texas-born singer-songwriter Jess Williamson; the result is a feisty, ’90s-nodding country-pop gem.

“I’m cute and I’m rude with kinda rare attitude,” she boasts on the best song from her aerodynamic “Crash” — a top-tier lyric befitting some next-level Charli.

As in Belinda Carlisle, whom the Alvvays frontwoman Molly Rankin addresses at the climactic moment of this blissfully moody song: “Heaven is a place on Earth, well so is hell.” Towering waves of shoegaze-y guitars accentuate her melancholy and give the song an emotional pull as elemental as a tide.

A thumping, glittery one-off single from the British musician finds her continuing in the vein of her 2020 disco reinvention “What’s Your Pleasure?” and proving that she’s still finding fresh inspiration from that sound.

The Jamaican upstart Koffee has a contagious positivity about her, and this reggae-pop earworm is an effortless encapsulation of her spirit.

“No one ever told you it would be like this: You keep on getting older, but you feel just like a little kid,” the folk musician Anaïs Mitchell sings on this moving standout from her first solo album in a decade, which poignantly chronicles the emotions of a demographic drastically underexplored in popular music: women at midlife.

“It’s only the end of an endless time,” Tamara Lindeman sings in a mirror-fogging exhale, eulogizing a whole host of things taken for granted — love, happiness, the inhabitability of Earth — expressing a fragile, and very human, disbelief that they won’t last forever.

A correction was made on 
Dec. 9, 2022

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the musician who released “Complex (Demo).” She is Katie Gregson-MacLeod, not Kate.

How we handle corrections

Jon Pareles has been The Times’s chief pop music critic since 1988. A musician, he has played in rock bands, jazz groups and classical ensembles. He majored in music at Yale University. More about Jon Pareles

Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic for The Times and the host of the Popcast. He also writes the men's Critical Shopper column for Styles. He previously worked for Vibe magazine, and has written for the Village Voice, Spin, XXL and more. More about Jon Caramanica

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