The Unlaced list of ten best tracks of 2022, featuring Jockstrap, Bill Withers, Orville Peck and Black Midi - listen to the playlist here

“Welcome to Hell” - Black Midi

Chromatic guitar scales rattle as machine gun fire through the verses of Welcome to Hell. Industrial grade repetition devoid of polyrhythm and off beat variations - such is the façade of military life, punctual, regulated, uniform - set the musical backdrop for Geordie Greep’s entrance into narrativity.  Gone are the schizoid fragments spewed over the roaring noise of Schlagenheim, Pynchonian narrative cuts through the maelstrom of guitar, drums, sax and keys.  A concern for the materiality of the phonetic remains, the Greep chews his words before he spits them out, he gargles phonemes in the back of his throat, swilling them through gaps in his teeth before tying them together with his tongue forging chains of meaning.  Fresh on shore leave Tristan Bumble fumbles his way through cheap facile thrills in the seedy bars, brothels and casinos which line the dimly lit streets of coastal towns in a brief reprieve from the horrors of military life.  The chaos of the battlefield emerges later as the score becomes more spasmodic, the regularity of the guitars breaks down as a soldier fires blind unsure of his enemies whereabouts.

The speed of Welcome to Hell is the speed of war, a speed which effaces the moment from which it sped off from.  The multiple foreclosed endings (plural) are demonstrable of the groups concern with what has elsewhere been termed the hyperpresent; future and past vanish in favour of a permanent present, nothing has happened, nothing will happen, there is only the present.  Black Midi connect this condition of the hyperpresent to the battlefield and to war.  For surely the soldier is one subject who loses all sense of past and present. In the chaos of the jungle, the desert, the bombed out city, one can only be concerned with the presence of the other man with a gun hiding in the ditch or the next barricade, it is this present moment then that is surgically removed from the past moments which led to it and also from the ones it will surely lead to.  War, as Virilio infamously noted, never truly ends but rather accelerates as the driving force of civilisation.  The speed of war on the battlefield represented in Welcome to Hell continues in our own hyperpresent as the endless bombardment of the subject-cum-router with information - which of course has no territorial restrictions – and the compulsion to accept it readily, swallow it, digest it and shit it back out into the turgid soup of spent – and therefore useless - data. Black Midi thus soundtrack our own hyperpresent, they welcome us to our own seemingly uncaused and unending hell.   - James Shepherd 

“Debra” - Jockstrap

I Love You Jennifer B was my most anticipated album of the year – as a long term Black Country New Road and Mark Jenkin’s Bait (2019) fan, I stumbled across violinist and vocalist Georgia Ellery’s side project with Taylor Skye early in 2022. With the release of lead single Glasgow in the summer I was hooked and eagerly awaiting more. Safe to say, when the album landed I was not disappointed.

There isn’t a single miss on the whole record, but Debra encapsulates everything I love about the project – it’s a perfect marriage of genres, sounds, and textures, it's sexy, and most importantly, it's fun! Weaving playful lyrics across a warped and processed bhangra beat, the track feels unexpected and fresh. Ellery’s repeated vocals feel at once hypnotic and disjointed layered against the synthy backdrop of Skye’s production. I can’t wait to put it in all of my summer playlists and perform unnecessarily theatrical dances to it at parties, which, in my eyes, is the true sign of a song being an absolute banger. - Beth Exley

“Postman” - Toro y Moi

If, for some reason, you were cruising above the skies over the pacific last year, you’ll have caught Chaz Bear carving out a highway stretching from San Francisco to his mother’s native Philippines, cruising in his Jeepney - that brilliantly coloured bus made from an abandoned Willys jeep - as shimmering funk and kaleidoscopic psychedelia blare from the airways. It’s a spectacle exuding colour and life that goes by the name Mahal, a tagalog word for love, or expensive, repurposed to denominate an album wrapped in thoughtful meditations on love and belonging, where bangers like Postman weaponise breezy funk and rollicking “yeahhhs” only to browbeat the postal service for failing to indulge Chaz’s hankering for home. - Sam Quarton

“The Curse of the Blackened Eye” - Orville Peck

To appreciate Orville Peck’s work requires an understanding of his character; a gay, flamboyant, and entirely mysterious figure never seen without a cattleman hat and a fringed mask that resides somewhere aesthetically between masquerade and an executioner’s hood. He utterly drips with sex appeal, showmanship and a truly sincere affinity for Country music. This is perhaps why the mission of Peck- to inject an unprecedented level of brightness, queerness and mystique into a genre so easily reduced, for better or worse, to the butt of a joke about tired linchpin lyrics and decades-old tropes- has led to such a mesmerising and surprisingly dense body of work across just two studio albums and an EP of B-Sides. 

It is this track, The Curse of the Blackened Eye, from Peck’s second album Bronco that serves as the most cinematic, emotionally-charged and all-encompassing example of just what the hell his angle is with all this. As Peck croons his way through a tale that is part-breakup song, part-existential dread and entirely alluring, you can just about hear the murky shot glasses of whiskey being slid across a bartop and smell stale cigar smoke hanging in the air around you. As Orville closes this track with an uncharacteristically measured and quiet repetition of ‘Northeast sun…”, you begin to imagine him on a corner-stage in a dive somewhere dusty, clutching an old condenser mic on a shaky stand with both hands, performing to a room of not-enough people more interested in their drinks than the music. Of course, he is not. That kind of bar doesn’t exist anywhere anymore and those kinds of microphones don’t get used too often these days, but when you listen to The Curse of the Blackened Eye, you start to wish they were. - Louis Nokes

“Asylum” - Billy Woods

Billy Wood’s record label Backwoodz Studioz has had a superb year: from ELUCID’s I Told Bessie to Akai Solo’s Spirit Roaming, Woods and his associates have consistently produced some of the most lyrically and sonically progressive albums since the label’s inception. From this roster of superb releases (let’s not forget about Woods’ collaboration with Messiah Musik’s, Church) it is the album Aethiopes, produced by Preservation, that approximates flawlessness, positioning it as one of the best releases of 2022.

The track ‘Asylum’ is an especially vivid and unrelenting track; fitting, as the start of an album that obsessively traces global networks of wealth extraction and bloodshed – like Whitman’s burial lines that creep across the globe. Woods’ lyrics wrap vine-like round layers of flittering, janky piano keys and off-beat, drums: “I think Mengistu Haile Mariam is my neighbor / Whoever it is moved in and put an automated gate up / Repainted brick walls atop which now cameras rotated”. Mengistu, the Ethiopian despot responsible for the Ethiopian Red Terror, here is cordoned off from the world through ‘razor wire like a slinky’, ‘galvanised security fencing’, where even “the hills are alive with landmines”. This is space divided by class, race, and violence. Recalling Franz Fanon’s excoriations of a certain native bourgeoisie, the track scorns the ignorant, the greedy, the solipsistic; and carefully derides the psychological miasma that colonialism inculcates in the mind of the oppressed, even those who profit and position themselves atop their people.

It’s knotted, densely referential, and is abound with claustrophobic lines where entrapment and malaise are by-produced with this exploitative accumulation of wealth. And so, the jarring sax-accompanied refrain goes: “Never told the truth in your life? Can't start now / Ever so slowly, slowly locked up in your own house”. Disdainfully mocking this extractivism, the track asks how free can one be when the very history of colonial violence breeds cancer-like in the psyche of the post-colonial profiteer. This is radical archaeology. Woods excavates: as he does, he exposes the bloody, knotted, underside to capital’s tapestry.

Wealth begets ignorance begets violence begets loss - this disdainful myopia is reflected in the masterful use of sampling to close:

“You see how well they treat me? My own courtyard for private strolls. And in my chalet, every possible amenity, not to mention the occasional night visitors. I must confess kabiyesi, this detention seems to look well on you”

“But, so does captivity look well on a lamb we are fattening up for the feast. Or, perhaps as you say, on a wife we treat with special favor because she is going to bear us a child. What happens when the great day comes and there is only a calabash under the wrapper” - Harry Croxford

“Photograph” - Hether

There is a sense, across both of Hether’s consistently-inconsistent studio albums, that he is constantly trying, failing and trying again to show us all a very specific and singular something that could not be more crystal clear in his mind’s eye. This makes his music as artistically eclectic (to varying degrees of clarity) as it is wildly emotional and wholly malleable to anyone who hears it. This is also what makes photograph, from Hether’s 2022 album Play It Pretty one of the most hauntingly gorgeous and heart-rending songs of the year.

photograph takes plenty of time to wallow in shallow, ubiquitous terms of foreboding and gloom that won’t be new to anyone who ever lost themselves in moody alt-rock during a shitty week or thought they were going to be the next Palahniuk when they were sixteen. Plastic people, scorched Earth, blackened skies- it’s all there, every single easy image. Then, in one of the song’s many achingly beautiful crescendos, the skies part and you see something new and frighteningly real for the first time, something immediately more worthy of your heart and mind than any of the doom that we all love to carry with us sometimes. photograph is a song about whatever, or whoever, you want it to be. As long as it’s exciting, scary, mysterious and warm. As long as it’s beautiful. - Louis Nokes

“Brothers” - Gang of Youths

The explorer and composer David Fanshawe travelled the world recording tribal music in Africa and the Pacific, capturing indigenous music for posterity. He feared the advent of globalisation and imperialism on these cultures, and in many cases their heritage has vanished since his recordings in the 60s, 70s and 80’s. In 2018, David Le’aupepe - the frontman of the operatic Aussie rock outfit Gang of Youths- did an inventory after his father Telesco Le’aupepe died and digged up a couple of secrets his father possessed; chief among them a family he’d abandoned in immigrating to Australia. 

Drawing a line between the tribal recordings of Fanshawe that are sampled throughout Angel in Realtime and the emigre experience of Le’aupepe’s father, Gang of Youth’s imbue their grief-stricken third record with their most detailed orchestral production yet, to the point where it threatens to stumble under the weight of its own novelistic breadth. Brothers, though, is a plaintive piano-ballad addressed to the siblings Le’aupepe never knew he had, and despite its sentiment manages to depict his father as neither hero nor villain, a fully-dimensional parent victim to Western exploitation as much as a figure of intransigent courage. - Louis Norton

“Ride The Dragon” - FKA twigs

There’s a scrappy tape recording running through FKA twigs Caprisongs that feels like some beautiful hybrid between an ASMR whispering video, and a coy school girl admitting her love for a boy over long-since retired home-video technology: “Hey, I made you a mixtape”, she confesses on ‘Ride the Dragon’. It’s a sweetly intimate conceit conjuring blushes from your old crush who smiled at you in fifth period, but don’t get it twisted: this is but a siren’s call into the whirlwind, a moment of softness before twigs - with her unalloyed sexual agency, unconcerned with frivolous boys and their bullshit - cuts about town with her girlies looking for someone to ruin her makeup with. -Sam Quarton

“Happiness” - The 1975

1975 returned this year with the ambitious Street Hassle- indebted Part of The Band as lead single from fifth album Being Funny in a Foreign Language; but it was Happiness, a straightforward, jangly disco-pop number that burrowed its way into my head all winter: “I’d go blind just to see you/ I’d go too far just to have you near”. What’s clever about Happiness is how easy it all sounds, despite its gilded edges and build, it retains a diaristic, first-draft quality that is more DIY than the band have sounded in years; the joy Healy takes in sloppily careening from verse to bridge to break before a signature sax solo finishes the job is palpably amusing. With the most lithe vocal melodies of his career, backed by a band who, after 20 years, seem to handily play in tandem with every avenue of his flexible vocal performances, The 1975 manage to make simplicity elaborate; as if played in the hands of anyone who didn’t really mean it- it would lack any and all character. “You know what else is good about this track?”, Healy himself opined on Tape Notes recently. “It doesn’t rhyme”. - Louis Norton

Who Even Cares? 

Little Simz

Little Simz has been on something of a streak, coming off last year’s Mercury Prize Winning album, Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, her track Who Even Cares from her staggering fifth LP Who Even Cares is one of the best songs of 2022.

I could’ve picked tracks that show off what Little Simz’ has become known for- songs like Broken and No Merci certainly deliver the sense of scale and grandeur that fans have come to expect; big emotions, bigger orchestra’s. But exactly what I love about Who Even Cares is how simple and stripped back it is in comparison to the rest of Simz’ oeuvre. 

The track is leisurely and breezy but achieves staying power through its repetition. It’s chorus comes from longtime collaborator Cleo Sol ( “Who even cares if they say anything?”) as Simz muses over her own success and the survivors guilt of making a living through her music: “In this rat race, we all gotta get it somehow/ Can't worry about the others now”. Sol’s looping mantra comes as a relief to Simz’s bars. It’s the soft, unburdened sound of a woman finding closure in her own pyrrhic victory. - Jacob Gandy