Albums to look out for in 2022 include January’s release of Years & Years’s Night Call. It marks the resumption of singer Olly Alexander’s pop career after his starring turn in It’s a Sin, Russell T Davies’s hit television drama about gay Londoners during the onset of the Aids crisis in the 1980s. Working on the show encouraged Alexander to junk an album’s worth of songs and make, in his words, “a lot of upbeat, euphoric dance tunes”. The third Years & Years album, Night Call is the first to appear after the band’s transition into a solo project for the singer: his two previous bandmates are no longer members.
Also out in January is the new release from Earl Sweatshirt, formerly a member of Californian shock-rap collective Odd Future, now among the most distinctive voices in hip-hop. Like Years & Years, he canned an album’s worth of material before making his new one, Sick!, which was inspired by the pandemic. In a statement, he said: “These songs are what happened when I would come up for air.”
February brings the swiftly made follow-up to Black Country, New Road’s debut. The London rock band’s second album, Ants from Up There, is due to arrive a year after their first, a rate of production typical of their inventive, busy songs. Welsh auteur Cate Le Bon returns in the same month with Pompeii, the sixth album from an unpredictable but consistently high quality singer-songwriter.
The following month sees the arrival of the first of two albums from Jack White. Fear of the Dawn has been trailed by the controlled mania of lead single “Taking Me Back”, with its heavy drumming and precisely delivered guitar ordnance. Meanwhile, its companion album Entering Heaven Alive, due out in July, has been teased with the track “Taking Me Back (Gently)”, a gentle old-time country number, a characteristic act of stylistic juxtaposition.
Having seen his 2019 hit “Blinding Lights” dethrone Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” as officially the biggest single in US Billboard chart history last year, The Weeknd has a new album for 2022. According to the Canadian, it will be a companion piece to 2020’s After Hours. “If the last record is the after hours of the night,” he told Variety earlier this year, “then the dawn is coming.”
“We’ve had a band staying for the last month recording an album,” the owners of a Suffolk farmhouse announced on Instagram in August. They went to extol the sound of double bass, piano and drums wafting from open double doors: “Thank you Arctic Monkeys.” The results of the Sheffield band’s rural retreat are due to be revealed in the coming year.
It was Adele who spilled the beans about a forthcoming album from Kendrick Lamar. The singer told Rolling Stone magazine in November that she had heard new songs by the rapper, the same month that he played his first gig in two years. Fellow superstar Beyoncé is also rumoured to have an album on the way. Talking to Harper’s Bazaar last August, she said that she had spent the last 18 months in the studio. “Sometimes it takes a year for me to personally search through thousands of sounds to find just the right kick or snare,” she added. At that painstaking rate of progress, perhaps a surprise drop in 2032 is more likely.
Pop music in 2022 — Olly Alexander, Jack White, Arctic Monkeys
Pinoy Variant