After a rough couple of years, 2022 was the first time we felt something close to normalcy in clublands around the world. It's no surprise, then, that our album of the year is a straight-up dance floor album, where drum & bass, trance and electro collide, nailing the giddy but nervous energy so much of us feel these days. It was a year full of intriguing concept albums—like Loraine James' meteorologically-inspired Whatever The Weather—as well as career-best records from artists like Schacke, Kerri Chandler and Steffi, who showcased their ability to makie captivating full-lengths of just dance tracks, too. And pop and the underground came closer together than ever, with The Weeknd and Shygirl delivering records that work in the club as well as they do on the radio. Even Björk got in on the action with some gabber on her album Fossora. Bridging worlds, scenes and genres, here are our favourite albums of 2022, as selected by Resident Advisor's staff.

Album of the Year

- Delicate Records
  D. Tiffany & Roza Terenzi - Edge Of Innocence
  
  Electronic music is something of an ouroboros: sounds hark back to the past as trends recycle in a never-ending loop. The revival of genres like jungle and trance, among others, is proof positive, and the subject of many articles from cultural critics like Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher. But there's a distinction to be made here. Some artists' chase of rose-tinted nostalgia is nothing more than empty cliché, while others treat their return to a bygone era like a hero's journey—familiar, yet eclipsed by a new, fortified sensibility.
  
  D. Tiffany and Roza Terenzi achieve the ideal balance on their debut album, Edge Of Innocence. It offers a mélange of influences that run the hi-BPM gamut from electro to drum & bass without losing grip of the rippling, psychedelic groove at the core of everything this duo do. "Grains Of Sand" is a case in point, replete with synths that stab through a thicket of lumbering percussion, as is the fittingly named breakbeat bop "Redemption Arc," kitted out with all the sleek dynamism that emerges after a period of dark contemplation. By the end of Edge Of Innocence, you get the feeling that, though the duo are working with well-worn sounds, they've made them all their own. -Whitney Wei
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud

- Warp Records
  Hudson Mohawke - Cry Sugar
  
  Ross Birchard told us he only works up the nerve to make a solo album about every seven years, and this time it was worth the wait. Like a summary of his history of making weirdo IDM hip-hop and mainstream rap, Cry Sugar is the Glaswegian producer's most epic and wide-ranging LP, chock full of earwormy melodies, left-turn smackdowns and the symphonic pomp-and-circumstance that makes his work one of a kind. You can hear the last ten years of rap music refracted through Birchard's many-sided prism, which is often as funny as it is heavy as it is genius. Like the title implies, Cry Sugar careens from the depressed to the euphoric, each feeling pumped up to the scale of a Marvel movie. -Andrew Ryce
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
- Black Rave Culture Records
  Black Rave Culture - Black Rave Culture Vol. 2
  
  One of the most potent club weapons this year, the second offering from Washington DC supergroup Black Rave Culture is a motley crew of historical dance music styles from across the Black diaspora. Representing East Coast club, junglist rhythms and sunny house music with a truly holistic, cross-genre vision, the album teems with grit, unbridled energy and most importantly, power. From the baile funk underpinning "Never Left" to the '90s rave ethos of "Peace Plan," these tracks jump across styles effortlessly, and the fine-tuned production of members Amal, DJ Nativesun and James Bangura holds it all together. -Nyshka Chandran
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Kaoz Theory
  Kerri Chandler - Spaces And Places
  
  When it comes to making music, too many house and techno legends struggle to hold a candle to their younger selves. Not Kerri Chandler. The US house giant's latest album, Spaces And Places, is a three-hour epic stacked with the kind of tasty grooves and lush instrumentation we've all been gobbling up for 30 years. That its 24 tracks were mostly recorded inside the clubs and venues they pay homage to is both a remarkable feat and a quirky novelty. But it also speaks to something more profound: Chandler's global, enduring popularity. -Carlos Hawthorn
  
  Listen:
  Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Because Music
  Shygirl - Nymph
  
  As someone who's been listening to Shygirl since her breakthrough single, "Want More," it might have come as a surprise that the UK artist only released her debut album this year. But as the saying goes, good things take time. This record, aptly titled Nymph—a play on words nodding to the album's whimsical nature and bawdy undertones—is Shygirl in full effect. The vocalist's hooks are tighter than ever, and the ever-expansive production spans pastoral pop, raunchy hip-hop, nostalgic Eurodance and the kind of saccharine hyperpop that trends on TikTok. More than just an excellent first LP, Nymph is a masterclass on collaboration, boasting production credits like Sega Bodega, Arca, Mura Masa and more, whose work melts effortlessly into Shygirl's one-of-a-kind style. -Kiana Mickles
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Smalltown Supersound
  Carmen Villain - Only Love From Now On
  
  Norwegian musician Carmen Villain has a preternatural ability to evoke a sense of cold, uneasy beauty. Her fourth album, Only Love From Now On, features ambient compositions that are often startling in their psychological intrigue. On "Future Memory," Villain expertly braids the sounds of cooing birds, humming flutes and irregular heartbeats to build suspense. "Liminal Space" conjures something similar, except with the inclusion of what seems like faint, irregular footsteps that stumble closer and further away. With its disarming atmospherics, Villain's fourth full-length has nothing to declare—only quiet intensities to whisper. -W.W.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Tresor
  Waajeed - Memoirs Of Hi-Tech Jazz
  
  Waajeed's debut on the prestigious Tresor label is a tribute to his hometown of Detroit, as a rousing tribute to both Black leisure and resistance against oppression. Conceptualised with a mini road trip around the Motor City—specifically, from the his own Underground Music Academy to Belle Isle—Memoirs Of Hi-Tech Jazz connects the dots between Detroit's rich musical traditions, encompassing jazz, deep house, minimal techno and marching band music. Even the title, a reference to the Underground Resistance subgroup Galaxy 2 Galaxy, reflects Detroit's storied sonic lineage. Proud, joyous and unapologetically local, Waajeed's love letter to his hometown is packed with velvety tones and lustrous chords that acknowledge the past and pave the way for the future. -N.C.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- PAN
  Marina Herlop - Pripyat
  
  Do you ever wonder how the world looks through a baby's eyes? Everything's new, and nothing makes sense. It's just one brilliant, ever-shifting mirage of colour and sound. Marina Herlop's third album, Pripyat, dazzles in a similar way. Where the Catalan artist's first two records showed off her expert piano playing and freeform, wordless vocals, Pripyat goes a step further into the unknown, patching together her classical training with dissonant electronics, and even weaving in an ancient Indian singing style called konnakol. The album might share its name with a ghost town, but Herlop's Pripyat is alive and bright with boundless imagination. -Joseph Francis
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Ghostly International
  Whatever The Weather - Whatever The Weather
  
  While Loraine James was working on her acclaimed 2021 LP Reflections, Loraine James filed away several songs that would ultimately make up her self-titled album, Whatever The Weather. On this meteorology-themed album, James did away with her club sound completely to write a series of ambient tracks distinguished by a worn, melancholy beauty. Here, intermittent rain is depicted as a flurry of lustrous synths, "14°C" is transformed into pensive arpeggios—the playfully jagged IDM she's revered for—and sounds hiccup and stop-start across placid pads all over the LP. As an artist whose main project emphasises tricky beats over strikingly subdued terrain, her pivot to producing a downtempo record—and doing it so well—makes perfect sense. -K.M.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Rush Hour Music
  Soichi Terada - Asakusa Light
  
  Before this album, Japan's deep house don hadn't released a full-length in over 25 years. But it's abundantly clear that he hasn't lost his touch. There's a light, almost weightless, feel to this 11-track LP as the Tokyo composer and producer shows off his mastery of twinkling chords, spacey disco grooves, vintage synth patterns and video game sounds. Asakusa Light is relatively sparse—even its big-room tracks like "Bamboo Fighter" feature relatively minimal arrangements—which allows his signature melodies to really shine. Graceful and flowing, this is an album that celebrates Terada's craft without feeling like a pastiche of his '90s discography. -N.C.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Dekmantel
  Marcel Dettmann - Fear Of Programming
  
  Marcel Dettmann has always earned more attention for his DJing than his productions, but real fans know that his discography is a treasure trove of dark, detailed techno. Fear Of Programming, which lands on the all-purpose Dekmantel label, is something different: bright, vibrant, even a little funny (thanks to a vocal guest spot from fellow Berghain resident Ryan Elliott). Fear Of Programming is loaded with bold, bassy techno and arresting ambient passages. The real gold is in the hooks, which the spartan but still powerful production emphasizes like a gold frame around a masterpiece painting. It's the work of someone who knows techno inside-out, and knows how to make it compelling without going too far outside the box. -A.R.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Python Syndicate
  Hagan - Textures
  
  With his debut album Textures, the South London DJ and producer Hagan celebrates the intersecting cultures close to his heart with rich, percussion-driven music. Organic flourishes (Ghanaian group chants, windswept koras and sunny guitar lines, to name a few) broaden the horizons of his historically urban sound palette, and he truly comes into his own as an all-around songwriter. With expertly curated vocal collaborations that reflect on family and faith, elements of gqom, amapiano and highlife, Textures is a transportive ode to the drumming continent, and the meaning of growing up both within and away from it. One moment you're in a lush, jungly landscape, the next you're hustling in the streets of Accra. Textures is more than just African dance music; it's a vibrant amalgamation of all the ingredients and influences that make Brendan Ware Hagan. -Emeka.Okonkwo.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Soma Records
  Deepchord - Functional Designs
  
  All of Deepchord's records are good—all of them—but a few are extra special. Functional Designs falls into this category. On first glance, it's not all that different from his countless other LPs. You've got gaseous dub techno beats echoing out into a painstakingly woven web of field recordings, sure. But the melodies are bigger, the drums are heavier and, most importantly, the tracks are separate, each with its own hook, its own uniquely staggered rhythm. Creating another noir-ish world of rainy-night ambiance, Functional Designs is one of Deepchord's most approachable and immersive LPs, gently refurbishing the rock solid formula of dub techno that the Detroit artist has relied on for decades. -A.R.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
- One Little Independent
  Björk - Fossora
  
  Björk spent a lot of time dancing and thinking about mushrooms during lockdown. From this—a time she described to Pitchfork as her "fungus period"—came Fossora, the Icelandic vanguard's tenth album. Björk has been making music for over three decades now, and with each record she steps into mystical, uncharted territory, creating work which is ever more beguiling, more avant-garde and always, somehow, even more Björk. On Fossora, Björk sings with a sweeping gravitas over rich woodwinds and distorted gabber beats, the additional instrumentation dancing around her vocal as she muses on the circle of life, nature and her own late mother. Digging her fingers into the earth, Björk unknots tributaries of tangled roots, the crashing drum patterns and complex textures representing the stark, breathtaking topography of her homeland. -Katie Thomas
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Incensio
  Huerco S. - Plonk
  
  From the first three seconds of Plonk, you know Huerco S. isn't doing the misty ambient thing again. Plucked strings ping in various directions, like popcorn exploding in a pan. Or, to be more accurate, like parts of a car yawning into gear. The automotive-inspired album, his first in six years, takes the American artist's sound to strange and innovative places—new sounds, unexpected textures, a first-ever vocal cameo. Isn't this what great artists do? Evolve, take left turns and, crucially, always deliver. -C.H.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Hyperdub
  Kode9 - Escapology
  
  Britain has never felt so close to collapse as it did in 2022. Between prime minister jockeying, mini-budgets and a volatile currency, Steven Goodman returned as Kode9 with a record that made the perfect accompaniment for the instability of the modern UK landscape. Written to accompany an experimental video game about Scotland leaving the union, Escapology operates along a dual axis, at once anxious—filled with eerie bits of sci-fi chatter and dense layers of swelling feedback—but also hopeful, at least when he turns to club tracks. "Uncoil," for example, is a pearl half-covered in sand somewhere between drum & bass and footwork, while "Cross The Gap" uses the negative space of dub to create something glimmering in the weight of the darkness around it. -Henry Ivy
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
- Ice Drop
  DJ Lag - Meeting With The King
  
  After years pushing the Durban scene and helping to make the sound a global sensation, anticipation for DJ Lag's debut album, Meeting With The King, was sky-high. He used the opportunity to champion his community instead of his own glory, creating a record that is collaborative from start to finish, with a majority focus on artists hailing from his home country of South Africa. Meeting With The King takes the moody sonics of the gqom—born from township house parties—and makes it polished, opulent, even melodic, honouring the origins of the sound while adding catchy elements of amapiano, house, Afrotech and more. The title is boastful, but it's not wrong—on Meeting With The King, DJ Lag stakes his claim and continues his ascent, taking his musical family along for the ride. -K.T.
  
  Listen:
  Apple Music / Spotify
- Instruments Of Discipline
  Schacke - Apocalyptic Decadence
  
  Martin Schacke—of "Kisloty People" fame—has a knack for writing a hook. And almost every track of his debut album is decadent and addictive, loaded with catchy melodies. While the first half of the release gestures towards new beat and EBM—"Miasma Of Filth" and "Tasteless Passion" both pull from a lineage of tinny 808s and mid-tempo industrial—the second half offers grade-A techno-pop made for the the dance floor. Songs like "Body Type" and "Dungeon Crawler" are deceptively simple production-wise, but their repetitive choruses are the stuff that makes crossover hits. It's easy to imagine waiting for the train in the early morning hours after the rave, deliriously looping these brash three-note motifs again and again through your head. -Chloe Lula
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Night Time Stories
  Ron Trent presents WARM - What Do The Stars Say To You
  
  Ron Trent's WARM project captures it all in the name. As the Chicago house genius has advanced in his career, he's slowly luxuriated into a silky fusion sound that plucks from jazz, Balearic and soft rock in the spirit of carefully considered collaborators, like Texan psych-rock trio Khruangbin or Italian ambient composer Gigi Masin. "Admira," for instance, unfurls alongside loose bongo drums like a satisfying slow yawn after a midday slumber. Dappled sunlight patchworks "Flos Potentia," bound together by strumming bass guitar, and "On My Way Home," an earnest, jazzy sonic panacea for the oft-jaded ennui of modern music. After a long 11 years away from the format, Trent's latest album is a gorgeous evolution to behold. -W.W.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Modern Love
  Jamal Moss - Thanks 4 The Tracks U Lost
  
  Jamal Moss, under his own name and as Hieroglyphic Being, is one of the defining forces in Chicago dance music. Whether he's making jacking house, experimental noise or blown-out techno, his work is defined by its sense of pure energy as he whips his machines into a frenzy. You'll find plenty of that rawness on his first LP for Modern Love, but where Thanks 4 The Tracks U Lost stands apart is in its surprising tenderness. Don't get me wrong—the drums have plenty of edge, and Moss still pushes his synthesizers to their breaking points—but the record is strikingly wistful, making for one of the most beautiful and tenderhearted of the many albums he's released. -H.I.
  
  Listen:
  Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Ratskin Records
  Beast Nest - Sicko
  
  In their work as an organiser and mediator, Beast Nest, AKA Sharmi Basu, believes that healing should be a communal effort. The process for making Sicko could be described as a collective effort. The LP was recorded in the years following 2016's tragic Ghost Ship fire, which ended up killing 36 people in an unlicensed warehouse. Sicko was an integral part of their healing journey as a survivor. There's palpable catharsis written into the energetic pulse of the album, which bleeds several genres into a satisfyingly cohesive mix that makes it difficult to discern where one song ends and another begins. Ambient sequences with knotty sections that twinkle and flutter turn into spaced out dub and then, somewhere along the way, listeners are transported to post-punk-leaning IDM. The songs sprawl out slowly, but capped at six tracks, the LP is actually quite short, emblematic of the slowness of grief and the unpredictable, dynamic moments that accompany it. -K.M.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
- Stones Throw
  Sudan Archives - Natural Brown Prom Queen
  
  Sudan Archives has always been a jewel of eccentricity. On her boundless second album, Natural Brown Prom Queen, rewind-worthy lyrics, maximalist experimentation (and what might be the most beat switches per song this year) coalesce into one remarkable document of self-empowerment and discovery. She embodies both her inner child and the person she's becoming ("I just wanna build LEGOs / I just wanna build, let's go"), all while keeping her signature sultriness dialed up to the max. Even putting her signature violin to the sidelines doesn't distract from her unique songwriting style. By the time she brings it home on the closer, "#513," she's delivered a defiant manifesto of hedonism, joy and femininity that raises the bar when it comes to post-genre pop music. -E.O.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Six Shooter
  Tanya Tagaq - Tongues
  
  Amid an ongoing reckoning with Canada's own history of indigenous genocide, Inuk artist Tanya Tagaq's sixth album approaches this legacy with righteous fury and surprising tenderness. An extension of a book of verse of the same name, Tongues takes stock of decades of violence and its effects on the bodies and minds of a people, but also recognizes the power one can possess in even the most hopeless of circumstances. Combining her traditional throat singing with English words wielded like daggers, it's a disarming and personal listen that makes the historical personal, underlining the scale of a tragedy but also the resilience and power of those who have survived it. -A.R.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Candy Mountain
  Steffi - The Red Hunter
  
  For the past five years, Steffi has been refining a style of electro that sits somewhere between bruising club weaponry and crystalline IDM sound design. The Red Hunter broadens this palette to include touches of hip-hop and contemporary club music, while keeping the nuts and bolts of classic Detroit in place. The result is the best full-length of her career. On The Red Hunter she creates a singular cosmology where strange, stuttering drum patterns emerge underneath windswept melodies and contracting basslines. But even as she moves into far-flung realms, she never loses sight of the club, and almost every single one of these tracks would make a head-turning standout in a DJ set—which is what we've always come to Steffi for in the first place. -H.I.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Looking For Trouble
  Mall Grab - What I Breathe
  
  In just a few years, Mall Grab went from master of a niche to king of everything. His debut album is a Chemical Brothers-sized crossover behemoth, attacking every form of radio-friendly dance music, from big room house to pounding jungle. It's inspired by the sounds of his adopted home of London, and to his credit, it captures what makes the city so enduring in dance music history. A restless blend of sound system culture, American and European imports and the kind of vocal hooks you hear on BBC Radio 1—with a few vocal turns from the man himself—it transforms Mall Grab from bedroom producer into something closer to a pop star. -A.R.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Leisure System
  Dopplereffekt - Neurotelepathy
  
  Gerald Donald and To-Nhan Le Thi of Dopplerekkeft's second LP, like many 2022 albums, emerged from the toils of pandemic-induced isolation. The album's accompanying press text loftily asserts that its ten tracks are "considerations of the machine-human interface" and "transformative mental, psychological and transgenerational states." While some of these (perhaps overwrought) academic themes come through in the album's titles, it mostly sounds like the duo's mood piece-like electro fare—in the best possible way. The tracks throughout Neurotelepathy aren't predictable arrangements made for club play. They're spare and considered, making exquisite use of spatial sound design, spectral percussion and arpeggiated melodies. Some songs, like "EEG," take more than a minute to settle into a more legible song structure, but their expertly rendered craftsmanship make them worth the wait. -C.L.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify
- Hyperdub
  700 Bliss - Nothing To Declare
  
  Spoken word and darbuka drums join in holy matrimony on this joint album from 700 Bliss—Philadelphia-based Moor Mother and DJ Haram. As the first full-length work from the duo after a series of collaborative EPs, Nothing To Declare sees the two artists claiming their matriarchal stake in electronic music. Haram's frenetic electronics speak in dialogue with Moor Mother's throaty vocals, delivered with a potent urgency. "Things ain't been the same since they put the lynch on us / water thicker than blood they convinced us," Ayewa opines. She's always been fearless in her delivery, but it's Muzeyyen's jagged productions that drive the point home. -W.W.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- SVBKVLT
  ABADIR - Mutate
  
  SVBKVLT became one of the most important club music labels by showcasing the vital Shanghai club scene, though the label's purview has expanded and only become more vibrant in the process. Case in point: this LP from Cairo producer ABADIR, which combines a freewheeling style of jungle with Arabic rhythms. This is music that sounds permanently out of breath, feeding off its own excitable energy. Inspired by maqsoum music and the humid bustle of the Egyptian capital, Mutate features impossibly funky beats shrouded in thick field recordings and melodies that hang in the air like smog. It's a vision of the kind of global club music that SVBKVLT has always championed, and one of the best records in a catalogue that constantly ups the ante for where club music can go next. -A.R.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Timedance
  Batu - Opal
  
  According to the International Gem Society, an opal is "distinctly individual"—more so than any other gemstone. The 3D-rendered opal on the cover of Batu's debut album is just that: a unique kaleidoscope of colours. Icy blue, vibrant green and a hot, lava red contrast with the grey underside of the opal and the moody background. Examining Opal's cover gives a strong sense of the sounds within. 11 tracks of sharp (though sometimes soft), complex and unpredictable electronic sculptures, a world of intricate sound design that Batu said he intended to feel vivid and transportive. Like so many LPs released this year, Opal is a lockdown record, made when Batu was in an introspective and contemplative state of mind, experimenting with moving away from club 12-inches and into a space more vulnerable and experimental. -K.T.
  
  Listen:
  Bandcamp / Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud
- Young
  FKA twigs - Caprisongs
  
  Caprisongs was one of the first RA Recommends of the year, and it was no surprise to many of us that it lingered long enough in our minds to make this end of year list. The album is brighter than anything we'd heard from twigs before. Gone is the operatic austerity of MAGDALENE. Instead, Caprisongs is a pop album with a capital P. The album mines from Afrobeats, grime, baile funk and R&B. It also sources from her personal life via snippets of conversations she recorded with loved ones. The immersive world she creates here deals with insecurity, "stupid boys" and friendship, but it's also celebratory. The world had opened up, after all. Twigs might have had a cry now and then, but at least she was doing it on the dance floor in the album's first single, "Tears In The Club.". As phenomenal as Caprisongs is, it's somehow even more impressive because it was pulled off with a welcome sense of humour. The album title, for example, is inspired by astrology—her "stubborn Caprisun ass telling her to work through the pain." Listeners can even eavesdrop on an astrological reading by the album's close. Sometimes, a little stubbornness is worth it. -K.M.
  
  Listen:
  Apple Music / Spotify / Soundcloud