The 13 best pop albums of 2022 radiate with unstoppable playlist power, much-needed sweet escapism, self-reflection, self-criticism, and killer melodies.
Taylor Swift’s Midnights, her latest musical pivot, highlights her artistry by overshooting her commercial ambitions. It’s a capstone to Swift’s career.
On Midnights, Taylor Swift reflects on the ghosts of the past and maps the rarely straightforward journey of fully becoming one’s self with pristine popcraft.
Taylor Swift’s Red and its reissue Red (Taylor’s Version) realign the goals of pop music, making an album’s perceived imperfections the new standard.
In the ten years since Red‘s release, it’s easy to take for granted just how pivotal it was in solidifying the visage of Taylor Swift—the woman, the myth, and the machine.
Red (Taylor’s Version) is both an Intellectual Property strategy tool, and a prolepsis of the status that the 2012 album will uphold in the future.
Taylor Swift’s “Wonderland” and “long story short” use imagination to interpret reality, whereas Lewis Carroll’s Alice draws from reality to understand the imaginary.
Taylor Swift responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with an album uniquely suited for it: contemplative, low-fi, acoustic songs perfect for isolation.
Tayor Swift’s second surprise album of 2020, evermore, solidifies the questions brought up by folklore: how do we consider her work when it’s not autobiographical anymore?
Despite a global pandemic, an economic crash, and the shut-down of international touring, 2020 bestowed an embarrassment of musical riches upon us.
In 2020, Americana artists empathetically dealt with the things that bind us together and keep us apart. The albums on this list encourage hope for the future based on a belief in the human spirit.
Taylor Swift’s childhood has frequently acted as the rare domain that can neither be snatched by tabloids nor staked out by fans, but “seven” presents a narrative of innocence dragged out of a child by abuse.
