Kelela's astounding, near-ambient "Washed Away" ended up at #3 on my Best Songs of 2022 list, and anticipation was high before her performance at the Fonda here in LA in the spring. The artist emerged alone on a dark, cavernous stage, the music prerecorded—not exactly an unusual tactic for a singer these days. But somehow, as she moved with a zen-like confidence through tracks from Raven, the impression was a kind of supernatural command, as if she was conjuring these sometimes thunderous, sometimes ethereal sounds magically out of the air. It's an appropriate image, as apparently Kelela regrouped during the years since her last album, Take Me Apart, incorporating the catharsis of the Black Lives Matter protests to re-center her art around queer Black womanhood. For sonic assistance, she turned to the cream of the crop of global knob-twiddlers like Kaytra, LSDXOXO, and Nguzunguzu, summoning beats from the spectrum of Black-innovated electronic styles. But far from feeling like a collection of varying sounds, Raven is clear and focused, with a purity that makes even the clubbiest moments feel meditative. Appropriately, the lyrics have the precision of mantras, and when she sings "are you tough enough for love," it feels like both the most personal request of a partner, and a question to all of us.

Another album where my opinion of it has been enhanced by a revelatory live show. I went into Yaeji's April 2023 performance at the Novo in LA without much in the way of expectations, and it turned out to be my favorite live show of the year. She sang to track, but was joined by two dancers and a vibrant, abstract light show, owning the stage with a thrilling display of confidence and wry humor. It reminded me of nothing so much as Madonna during her Blond Ambition tour, accompanied by her two backup singers Donna de Lory and Niki Harris (see the Express Yourself performance at the 1989 VMAs to get the idea). Additionally, if you want to see a Korean-American artist live, you can do worse than see her in LA, where a vibrant Korean fanbase shows up with infectious energy.

All this to say, this show perfectly captured the catharsis and confidence of With a Hammer's transformative fury and irresistable joy. The music has matured past the (admittedly awesome) house-banger energy of 2017's "Raingurl," with a quirky, jazzy spaciousness that allows for even more thrilling modes of expression. Even though Yaeji has said in interviews that anger was a starting point for conceiving this album, each track resolves this anger into inspiring positivity and growth.

Anybody remember the oughties? My main musical enjoyment tool of that era was one of the iPod Classics with an unfathomably-spacious-at-the-time hard drive (160 GB?) onto which I dumped every promo CD that came across my desk, as well as every iffy-quality mp3 of a live DJ set I could track down on the dark corners of the internet. I had hundreds of those, but for many years, my go-to mix on trains and flights and during workouts or long drives or plugged into speakers at parties was a set from British DJ and producer James Holden, recorded live at Piknic Electronik in Montreal in September 2007. Like so much of the music I have adored in my life, from Boards of Canada to Sonic Youth, my slow-to-catch-on brain needed multiple listens to fully grasp the genius of this set, especially since its 3h30m length means it takes its sweet time. Holden was then known for one album and a couple fascinating remixes; one of those, an unlikely version of Madonna's "Get Together," appears in this set, and even in Madge's pantheon of great remixes his stands out, utilizing Madonna's voice only in warped, time-stretched pieces that eventually resolve into two repeated phrases: "it's all an illusion," and "I'll make you feel better."

Those phrases point directly towards Imagine. Holden's patient attention to detail and layered psychedelia come to mature fruition here, diving back into a rave era he was too young and geographically isolated to experience himself (I at least share the latter with him). It's a continuation of his career-long aim for music as entrancement and transcendence, here combining electronics with live and improvisational elements, partially inspired by a rough pandemic experience that encouraged him to put out more "joyous" work. His ethos retains a bit of idealistic politics like on standout single "Common Land," but mostly the goal here is the simplest and most challenging: to free your mind.

The most exciting debut of the year. This English/French four-piece seemed to take the entirety of music culture and turn it off and on again, emerging with something that's impossible to categorize. It's electronic, sure, but it's also punk, I think, so it maybe fits into a club where Battles or LCD Soundsystem or, uh, Thrill Kill Kult might get played. Did I mention it's in French? Google Translate provides insight into tracks like "Drag [Crashed]," which takes the harrowing perspective of a leering male harassing a young woman, and the relatable "Pinking Shears," which cries: "ce monde de merde m'a épuisée" ("this world of shit has exhausted me"). J'ai compris.

The Swedish artist continues their exploration of the personal and the political that landed their 2017 album Plunge on my top 10 of that year. In the past, they've explored sexual freedom and queer reimagining of modes of interrelating, but Radical Romantics dives deeper into the universailty of heartbreak and the difficulty of true connection. It renders the title oddly wry: if we're so radical, why does it hurt so much? On "Kandy," they modify their voice down a notch, Prince-style, to seemingly reflect on a lost lover, and the devastating thought that you might never get to express your love, your truth: "what if I die with this song inside?"

L'Rain's second album Fatigue was a late entry into my Best Albums of 2021 list, my favorite of what was that year's perhaps coincidental preponderance of real-audio-meets-glitchy-electronica projects. When the first two singles from Killed emerged in August, it seemed like another leap forward for the Brooklyn artist, smashing genre limitations and embracing experimentation. I'll admit the album title is such a shock (we have three dogs now!) it took me a bit of a deep breath before diving in, but it turns out the album is both disarmingly tender and clear-eyed, theatrical in its evocation of passion and heartbreak.

America's most malleable of bands has by now been pretty much everything. Where do you land, 39 years (!) into a career of deeply moving, archly wry and rapturously joyous work? You circle back, returning to ground you (and, well, Sonic Youth, most significantly) have already explored and find new paths, new vistas, new approaches to the darkness and beauty of our incredibly dumb, incredible world. As they say on the title track: "It's killing me... it's all we have."

It was at their October show at Amsterdam's Paradiso during ADE where I finally sorta grokked that the Welsh sibling duo's whole artistic agenda seems to be carrying the torch for distinctly British electronica. A lot to live up to for the UK, even if you restrict it to actual brothers or guys who are also named Tom and Ed (that's so weird, by the way). Anyway, Overmono, uniquely, balance the melodic adventurousness and techical wonk of artists like Bicep with the brashness and heft of often Black UK innovations like two-step and grime. Their triumphant 2021 single "So U Know" set the stage with its glitchy breaks, and on Good Lies they turn up the beats and the emotion while avoiding the cringey pitfalls of some current Burial wannabes. The Chems are still doing great work (see below), but Overmono seem poised to take on the mantle of distilling the diversity of Britishness into thrilling, pounding anthems.

The veteran UK producer has veered from brutal techno to hip-hop to soundtracks in his career, but Sus Dog seems to find Clark focused on, well, making an "album," and for the first time, singing lead. The lucky guy has previous collaborator Thom Yorke on board as an "executive" producer, and I'm not sure what that means except that this album does at least somewhat fill the emotional space a Radiohead album might. "Town Crank" leads off with falsetto vocals and a krautrock-y synth groove that wouldn't be out of place on In Rainbows, but then explodes into a pounding beat, the bassline distorting and veering off course. So it's not like he's "reined in," production-wise, but it's fascinating to see Clark's experimental tendencies focused and anchored by his warm, expressive voice.

Seems like now more than ever, everybody in dance music is ending up in Berlin, and I can't let my envy make me mad about it, since the work of the city's immigrants—Peggy Gou! Avalon Emerson! Honey Dijon!—seems to be bursting with creativity. Fellow Berlin transplant Sofia Kourtesis embodies the best of both Berlin and her home of Peru on Madres, an album bursting with emotion and rich with cultural touchstones, but also perfect for the Panorama bar dance floor. Kourtesis' mother's struggles with cancer are at the forefront, and 2022 track Estacion Esperanza (#40, definitely too low, on my singles list that year) samples a gay rights protest, but the mood is somehow always joyful. Madres is music as catharsis while remaining deeply empathetic and inclusive, as warm as a mother's hug.