The Sampler: The best international albums of 2022

Tony Stamp reflects on ten of his favourite international releases from the past year.

God Save the Animals by Alex G

The American songwriter's ninth album was the first to be partly recorded in a professional studio, but aurally there’s not much difference between it and earlier efforts.

Barely a moment passes without a great melody, whether it’s vocal or otherwise. The way they build up and cascade is a big part of the album’s pleasures. What differentiates him is a willingness to experiment, most notably with his voice, often pitching it up or down an octave, or manipulating it in other ways.

Lyrically he alternates between disarmingly straightforward, and pleasantly cryptic.

What kept me coming back to God Save the Animals beyond its melodies is the curveballs he consistently throws into his songs: blasts of distortion, unexpected jazz or blues chords, a sudden drum machine frenzy, they all happen, and never seem out of place.

Grotto by Wilma Vritra

When you hit play on a hip hop record, you don’t necessarily expect to hear expertly orchestrated string sections. I’m not saying it’s unheard of, but what grabbed me about this album is how much attention they were given, along with brass and other live instruments. 

Grotto represents a meeting between British producer Wilma Archer’s sense of soul, and American rapper Vritra’s sense of self. There’s a lot to dig into in his confessional, philosophical wordplay, as well as Archer’s rich instrumental concoctions.

There's swagger on tracks like 'One Under', powered by Archer's saxophone, and elsewhere a focus on acoustic guitar gives 'Every Evening' the feeling of porch-side conversation. The LP is often melancholy, and on 'Tunnel Vision' even the drum machine sounds bummed out. Then Vritra takes a pause, and those strings come soaring back in.

MOTOMAMI by Rosalia

Spanish musician Rosalia won a Grammy for her album El Mal Querer, and over at that organisation’s website they say her latest “may be remembered as one of the most ambitious albums of the decade — regardless of genre”.

She studied at Barcelona’s Catalonia College of Music, leaving with a degree in flamenco vocal performance. MOTOMAMI sees her broadening her range to include styles like champeta from Colombia, dembow from Jamaica, and the Dominican genre bachata.

Her adoption of these styles hasn’t been without controversy, and they're accompanied by a stream of references to Western, African and Japanese culture. She’s a musical omnivore, bolting towards the future while honouring the past - the cover here of ‘Delerio de Grandeza’ by the Cuban salsero Justo Betancourt, also includes a sample of the rapper Soula Boy, and somehow it all works.

An army of producers worked on this album, from Spain, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Canada, and America. Rosalia is part of a generation whose short attention span is not necessarily a bad thing when it comes to musical output, and regardless Motomami is certainly cohesive, and consistently weird. 

The outro to one song features a voice message from her grandmother saying "How complicated is the world that ROSALÍA has gotten into" and between Motomami’s genre-hopping, pop-culture references, and production styles, that’s an understatement. 

Remember Your North Star by Yaya Bey

R&B has had an infusion of musicians making candid, confessional music, unfiltered stylistically and verbally. One of those is Yaya Bey, whose debut is full of bright, easy-going pop jams which are liberally dotted with curse words, to sometimes hilarious effect.

‘Keisha’ is the platonic ideal of a summertime head nodder, but in its chorus, Yaya Bey asserts her own worth in such a way I can’t repeat it on the radio. Like much of the album it’s self-affirming in a way that lets you know she’s going to say whatever she pleases.

The lack of any filter encapsulates the whole project: musically it can feel like a diary, with some songs carefully sketched, some hurriedly, emotively filled in. Signifiers of other genres appear like polaroids sellotaped into the margins.

Yaya Bey has described it as a thesis, dealing with Black womanhood and misogynoir - misogyny targeting Black women specifically. More tangibly, it’s a response to being controlled creatively: she told Okayplayer that up until two years ago her music was made under the strict vision of her then-husband. 

Going through the credits of Remember Your North Star, they’re clear that she wrote, performed and produced almost every track. She worked a full-time job while making it, and went to therapy. It’s the sound of her repairing herself spiritually, as well as finding herself musically.

Once Twice Melody by Beach House

The well-loved Baltimore band's eighth record was a double album that arrived in four chapters over a luxurious four-month period, but that felt appropriate given the grandeur of its music. And as you might expect from a double album, it was their most cinematic outing so far.

Beach House are a band known for doing quite a specific thing very well. The duo of Victoria Legrand on vocals and Alex Scally on guitar have added plenty more instruments to their arsenal over the years, including a vast reservoir of keyboards, and they deploy them over and over with a singular purpose, woozy and romantic. 

The first half of Once, Twice, Melody doubles down on the band’s style, like they’re trying to create the perfect version of a Beach House song, and then the latter opens up the gates to new styles and structures.

It’s a soaring, definitive collection, representing four years of work for the band, and shows how good the results can be when musicians decide to keep refining and building on a singular thing.

Painless by Nilüfer Yanya

In an alternate timeline, Nilüfer Yanya joined a girl group and became a pop star. An offer was made to the London singer-songwriter in 2014, after her demos on Soundcloud drew the attention of Louis Tomlinson of One Direction, for a project which subsequently fell apart.

She’s 27 now, and two albums deep into a critically acclaimed career, forged on knotty guitar playing, and downbeat verses that blossom into ethereal choruses; her pop sensibilities are still very much intact.

I was struck by how sparse these songs are. Yanya and her producers understand that prioritising her voice and playing is doing most of the work - the writing and performance are strong enough. She has that magical combination of talent and x-factor, and has created something that’s not quite pop music, but not far off.

Cheat Codes by Black Thought & Danger Mouse

When Tarik Luqmaan Trotter co-founded a rap group that would eventually be called The Roots in the late eighties, he named himself Black Thought. Those two words carry a lot of baggage, but looking back at his career, a moniker that profound is appropriate. 

The last eight years saw The Roots take up residency on The Jimmy Fallon Show, around the same time they released their last album, but Black Thought went solo for the first time in 2020, and 2 years later delivered a follow-up.

It’s called Cheat Codes, and this time was in partnership with producer Danger Mouse, who harks back to his earlier, rugged beat-making, as a platform for Black Thought’s hyper-literate wordplay.

On ‘The Darkest Part’ Kid Sister sings “Shine a light into the darkest part of me”, and Black Thought bounces off that sentiment to spin bars that draw a line from slavery to drugs and gun crime, mentions the pianist Thelonius Monk and boxer Roy Jones, and kinesiology (the study of movement).

The track ‘Belize’ features a typically hilarious posthumous verse from MF Doom, pausing mid-flow, clearing his throat, and rhyming the song’s title with ‘cheese’ and ‘squeezed knees’. 

Black Thought meanwhile is consistently dazzling not just through all the different ways he finds to rhyme things, but the rich sociological tapestry he presents.

Natural Brown Prom Queen by Sudan Archives

Ohio-born musician Sudan Archives started playing violin at a young age and went on to study ethnomusicology. The fiddle shows up on each song, deployed in a variety of ways. And her appetite for different sounds from different places is evident on her second album. It’s restless and hungry, at times impossible to pin down. 

She’s someone who could easily deliver a series of pop songs and frequently does treat the listener to a sugary hook or two. But Sudan Archives has many facets, and on Natural Brown Prom Queen, aims to show them all. 

There’s a reggae bump to ‘Selfish Soul’, buoyed by violin runs, and despite how effortless it all feels, it’s a song about something very personal and politically-charged: her hair. She says “If I wear it straight will they like me more/ like those girls on front covers”, and “we feel ashamed by the curls, waves and natural things”. 

As serious as these sentiments are, they’re all delivered tongue-in-cheek. Lyrically she’s conversational and free-flowing throughout this album, casually potty-mouthed, and down to earth. 

And her playing is just as malleable. The violin is prevalent, but never a gimmick. From the beats to her delivery there’s so much else going on, it’s just part of this ambitious concoction. 

Pre Pleasure by Julia Jacklin

Sydney singer-songwriter Julia Jacklin’s third album showed her as self-aware and reflective as always, with a razor-sharp sense of humour permeating all her writing. She blends the literal with poetic licence, on songs that alternate between rowdy and precariously delicate.

This LP introduced acoustic guitar to Jacklin’s sound, which is gently nudged away from guitar rock toward chamber pop. Throughout it she sets you up to expect a certain chord progression to continue and then switches to another, and every time she does it’s a pleasant surprise. The craft is impeccable, from the way she uses vocal harmony to add unexpected shading, to those articulate lyrics; sometimes heartfelt, sometimes bone-dry funny. 

It’s the best of her albums (all of which are very good), and sets itself apart from them while still being distinctly hers. 

Everything Was Beautiful by Spiritualized

In the late 1990s a band called Spiritualized, led by a former member of Spaceman 3, fused the garage rock power of The Stooges with psychedelia, and an abundance of instruments: brass, strings and choral arrangements were all part of the mix. One song was seventeen minutes long. Maximalism was the name of the game. Spiritualized were dubbed ‘space rock’, and their crowning achievement was appropriately called Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space. 

Twenty-five years have passed since then, and Spiritualized has kept releasing albums. But their latest, Everything Was Beautiful, refers back to their best-received work, in its artwork and themes, but mostly through a penchant for cramming in as many instruments as possible, and having the results prove transcendent. 

Jason Pierce AKA J Spaceman is the brain behind all this, although the band’s core lineup has been stable since 1999. He plays sixteen instruments on this album in addition to singing and was joined by over thirty other musicians and vocalists. Recording took place over eleven studios.

Some of the songs had over 200 tracks of audio. He said they had so much information, the slightest move would unbalance them, so he said he cast his mind back to that maximalist approach, and the way music starts sounding like something new if you add enough stuff to it. 

The artwork for Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space read ‘One tablet, 70 minutes’. The CD was enclosed in prescription foil. Everything Was Beautiful is similarly packaged like something you’d get from a chemist. Pierce clearly thinks this album will make you feel better. The adrenalin rush I get from these colossal soundscapes proves his point.