Best Of Month: Honorary Mentions and 2022's Most Anticipated Albums

 Hello, and welcome to AsterTracks’ Best of Month! The first real post of this very blog was my top EPs and Albums of 2020 which was a look into the music I liked the most in that year with some quick thoughts attached to the top ten. This year I decided to dedicate the entire month of December to looking back at 2021… but! We’re going to start by looking at the future. Every year people make their top lists in November to December but the thing is there’s still releases left in those last few weeks. So if you want to know my favorite records this year you’re going to have to wait until the very end of the month. This month I want to talk about five albums that I’m looking forward to, as well as shout out some music that didn’t quite make my top ten in these past months.

Honorary Mentions

Nickelback & The Lottery Winners - Rockstar Sea Shanty

Before you judge me, I know, but hear me out. I, like most people, feel very strongly about not liking

Nickelback. For some reason though this version hits differently. I suppose it’s just a fun time taking a classic butt rock track and turning into a style of music that, at the time of release, was a hot

commodity on the internet. Full transparency; when I post the list of top fifty singles next week, you

won’t see this on there but as far as the year went I found myself drifting to this track from time to time

on a car ride and I really wanted to mention it here.

Attack Attack! - Long Time, No Sea (Oxide)

If you followed me on Twitter all year you probably saw me really disappointed in the return of the

pioneers of crabcore but I think I was justified. This band leaned pretty hard into the grand return of

themselves and the genre they built from the ground up back in the 2000s, even getting a Gilbert

Gottfried cameo to usher it in. When “All My Life” dropped though it was not the not the warm

embrace of an old friend I had quite hoped for. Each and every single just felt like a joke at the

expense of my coming up as a music fan because frankly all three Attack Attack! records have a

special place in my heart and personal history. Yes, even This Means War.

If I ignore all that though? This is an admittedly fine debut. A bit of phoning in the silly song titles? Sure.

A bit strained in vocal delivery? Absolutely. But it’s fine all the same. None of these songs are

particularly offensive and to be honest I see a full length of this going way too deep into radio friendly

metalcore for my liking of using the legacy, but the EP is pretty solid and I wanted to at least shout it

out.

Luna Li - jams (In Real Life Music)

So in my top ten EPs this year I have something that technically you could say doesn’t count. So

because of that I decided to shout out my number eleven choice before I release the EP write up. This

to my knowledge was a quarantine project where Luna Li would record beats to use in her own Tik

Toks. While I never found myself putting this whole thing on aside from the initial listen I did have all

ten beats in my playlists all year and when they’d come on it’d be a nice little blissful hit of peace for

the next minute. When I was weighing the EPs for the year I found myself ranking this pretty

shockingly high on the list. I’ve been meaning to check out her other music too because all I’ve ever

heard are this and the song “Cherry Pit” which I also really enjoyed.

Lorde - Solar Power (Universal)

Lorde is an artist who had a lot of impact on me when her first record came out. At the time, I wasn’t

really allowing myself to experience any music that was outside of “The Scene” and if it didn’t have

screams I basically wanted nothing to do with it. The first time I heard “Royals” it was a YouTube video

of someone covering it because that’s just how out of the loop I was. There were entire top 40s hits

that I didn’t even know existed. So when I finally got around to Pure Heroine it became one of my

favorites of that year and possibly all time. So Lorde became really important to me.

When I heard the title track and lead single from this project I was excited. She was back after years of

silence and the song was, is, incredible. I was so excited about the track and the return that I thought

for sure this was going to be in my top ten come the end of the year. Then it just sort of wasn’t. The

issue with Solar Power as a record is it’s really good but it doesn’t quite cross the threshold into great.

There are a lot of stand out great tracks but there’s also a lot of moments that leave me scratching my

head. The classic themes of Lorde’s lyrics from modern day royalty to lots of references to being out

drinking are all still there but dressed in a setting that would sound more at home in a coffee shop or

fancy restaurant or even the theaters that she now expresses wanting to tour.

Around when the album came out, I was in heavy grief mode. I couldn’t believe it was that

underwhelming. “Maybe it’s the kind of thing that will stick with me after the first listen!” I said after

staying up till midnight on release day to hear. “Why does everyone online hate this so much? It’s the

worst of the three but it’s still Lorde!” I asked myself while understanding why in the back of my head. I

think what ultimately makes this album so underwhelming is that while “Solar Power” is a great track,

Lorde didn’t have enough there to make a whole record but she trucked along with the theme for

twelve whole tracks and two bonuses anyway. It’s still in my top fifty, but it’s far from a top ten.

Remi Wolf - Juno (Island)

All throughout the year, maybe once a month or so, Remi Wolf would drop a double single that was

somehow more creative and ambitious than the last. Each one had a massive hook and beat and I

found myself looking forward to each and every one. I knew the record was coming and despite the

fact that I loved everything I heard I didn’t find myself at all anticipating the record. Why?

Well first off, there is no excitement really in an album you’ve already heard and that is already all

available for streaming simply coming together in an official playlist. By the time this thing dropped I

think there were between two or four new tracks, so up to two more double singles and while I loved

them just the same it didn’t really feel special.

Secondly, the album felt like just that. It feels like a playlist. For as much as I love all the songs they

don’t have a collective point to get across or sonic direction. So it’s harder for me to put them above

the other records a bit higher up on the list that had cohesion to them.

I loved this record, in fact despite my issues it’s still number twelve on the list, I still revisit it all the time.

With all these nitpicks however I couldn’t really place it in the top ten. Maybe if all the tracks stayed

singles one would have been a top ten.

Most Anticipated Albums of 2022

Beach Bunny - LP2 (Mom+Pop)

This month you will see four of these lists from me and three of those four have Beach Bunny right at the front. That being said, I won’t trap you with this subject more but I’d be remiss if I didn’t include them in my most anticipated for next year. There’s been mention of album two for most of the year from the band on twitter and we have “Oxygen,” a new single featuring a much happier vibe, as well an “Entropy,” a new song that the band has been playing live on tour right now. Honeymoon and Blame Game have come out year-to-year, back-to-back in the first couple months of their respective year so I’m hoping to see this record come out before winter is through as well.

Coheed & Cambria - Vaxis II (Roadrunner)

Coheed & Cambria were basically the first band I ever truly loved. I heard “Welcome Home” on Guitar

Hero then begged my mom to buy me No World for Tomorrow on CD when it came out, having not

heard a single song and I listened to that album non stop for years. This led to the rabbit hole of all

their other stuff and me supporting anything they did for years. So when Unheavenly Creatures

dropped in 2018 I bought the biggest boxset they had for it and played that record out nonstop too.

At the time, Claudio Sanchez had mentioned in an interview that he had conceptualized the Vaxis portion of his Amory Wars narrative to take up the next five full-lengths from the band. It’s been a good few years since the first installment but we finally have what appear to be the first singles from the first of four sequels. Every Coheed track falls into one of two categories; emo anthem with shredding guitar and a huge catchy chorus, or strange prog track where Sanchez name drops characters and lore keywords into lyrics where he just assumes you’ve read up on this stuff or you like the music too much to care. Both of these singles are one of those two things but with their own flair in sound direction and I know whatever these are attached to is going to be massive.

Pierce the Veil - LP5 (Fearless)

Let’s get the “King for a Day” jokes out of the way now, yea? Pierce the Veil, in my opinion, is probably among the best in all of post-hardcore to do it. Period. It has been six years since Misadventures, a record that’s widely known to be a disappointment but if you ask me is the band’s best overall. On it Vic Fuentes really demonstrates what a perfectionist of a songwriter he is. It has the heavy jams for the pit but also his emotional rawness that’s the butt of many a metalhead’s jokes. In October the band revealed they are currently in the studio with Mutemath’s Paul Meany and have parted ways with longtime drummer Mike Fuentes for obvious reasons. So, with the bad one gone and Vic having six years to have been tirelessly working on the next chapter, I’m really hoping for a follow-up to Misadventures in the next year.

Pollyanna - debut LP (I Surrender)

Having only discovered this band this year while attending a virtual music festival, which is never really a sentence I thought I’d say, I sort of felt like I was missing out on some well kept secret and a goldmine of good tunes. Pollyanna’s Sugar Coat EP was a major part of my year despite it not really coming out in 2021. At a recent show in my area I got to catch this band live in person as opposed to on the other end of my screen and they even played a new song from this very upcoming record. I’m very excited to hear this, extend my congratulations on their signing to I Surrender records this year. I couldn’t get them to leak it to me, but I’m sure the full length is going to be just as big a deal for me and many others in 2022.

Wet Leg - Wet Leg (Domino)

This year, somehow, Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers more or less took over the world selling

out headlining dates, hitting the millions on YouTube and streaming services… all with one song to

their name. “Chaise Longue” wasn’t only basically the best post-punk song anyone had heard at the

time, it showed that these two had a sense of humor and endearing personality that you could easily

fall in love with. This past week (this counts as your last week in music for the week) they dropped their

third and fourth tracks, “Too Late Now” and “Oh No” and announced an April 8th release date for this

self-titled debut making this the only record on here with a release date. What gets me about each of

these tracks is how diverse they are while staying in the umbrella of their genre. It isn’t very often that I

want to replay singles over and over but all of these have me hooked. I didn’t mention the second

track? You’ll just have to read next week’s edition of Best Of Month.