Leave it to a goony Brit-turned-Angeleno to reinvigorate my excitement about electronic music with an album where doing everything wrong turns out to be right, and as Pitchfork said, is "so big, garish and dumb it's almost psychedelic." I'd remove that "almost"—this is HudMo picking up where SOPHIE left off, and maybe most significantly, evoking how Aphex Twin's "Windowlicker" flipped a sun-saturated vision of big-booty America into a glorious cartoon nightmare, both hilarious and disturbing, pained and joyous.

A band you just have to root for, summoning some of the most inspiring grooves and leftfield lyrics since the Pixies, seemingly effortlessly, from the Isle of Wight, apparently. In 2021 they taught me that it wasn't "chaise lounge" (was I the only one who thought that?) and in 2022, they teach me how to feel young again, if only for 36 minutes.

OK sure, placing an 80-minute confessional by a hip-hop eminence with a who's who of features next to a 36-minute jaunt of homemade pop songs by a couple of wee Brits highlights the absurdity of this album-ranking exercise, but Morale set the tone for new direction in hip hop in 2022: anguished, ambitious, honest, profound.

This Matmos side project is now on its 7th album and getting more and more fun, evoking classic African disco like Kiki Gyan. I found myself returning to Deeper over and over in various uncomforatbele seats on various airplanes in the last couple months; its patient, meticulously-layered disco groove was both mesmerizing and strangely appropriate to staring down at our wacky world.

Various outlets slot this album into "electronic," but Love has such an opulent and wildly diverse production style, at times incorporating a whole orchestra and at times just a ukelele or what sounds like an '80s drum machine under a pillow, that it's almost uncategorizable. Tongue-in-cheek or not, these are great songs, theatrical and wry, weird and yet weirdly familiar.

So many "side projects" in this year's list! Dan Snaith's Caribou has gotten pretty housey itself over the years, but the Daphni moniker, initiated as a club DJ identity, retains its more experimental and breezy vibe to great advantage on Cherry. It proves that sometimes, in the hands of a genius like Snaith, sketches can be masterpieces.

Even though I hate the cold more than ever these days I'm weirdly drawn to watching endless YouTube videos about isolated northern landscapes like Svalbard or Alaska. Maybe the solitude of Alvvays' original homes of Nova Scotia and P.E.I. helped produce these truly original artists, who delivered an album that's a bit like the New Pornographers via My Bloody Valentine, but mostly like nothing else.

Two seemingly disparate artists who have both appeared in my lists individually, but joined forces this year in a collaboration that may have been inspired by Python's 2020 remix of Minus' single "they told us it was hard but they were wrong," which brought gauzy syncopation to her brooding electro. This album's lovey-dovey title expresses both the surprisingly heartfelt lyrics and the project's inspiring merging of artistic souls.

At my day job, a lot of "ambient" music comes across my desk that seems cynically designed to appeal to algorithms and make cash money from piles of plays. This new project from Loraine James is the opposite: music that's hypnotic and atmospheric but with just enough strangeness and tense twists and turns to feel, well, real, bringing you into what the Quietus called "jellied depths."

Despite all of Thom Yorke's and Jonny Greenwood's efforts to hide in non-Radiohead bands or aliases or soundtracks or whatever, their music still reaches out to grab me, unexpectedly and thrillingly, with soaring chord changes, irresistible krautrock grooves and devastating turns of phrase that somehow fit the moment so perfectly you feel like they should be the official record of the times.