The Best Songs of 2022

Without any pretence of being exhaustive, and without trying to fully represent the editorial staff's rankings, we thought we'd share the playlists that best capture each of our own "musical year". The songs that stood out within a certain genre, the songs symbolic of breakout artists or major returning names – or, more simply, the songs that meant something to those of us who listened to them.

Gabriele Benzing

Have we ended up in the wrong timeline? Pandemic, war, climate crisis… as Mattia Salvia recounts in “Interregno”, the present increasingly resembles that episode of “Community” (by now elevated to meme status) in which a roll of the dice sends the characters into a dark timeline, where everything that can go wrong fatally does. “Don’t look back”, answers Chris Bathgate, accompanied by the sigh of the old organ on “The Significance Of Peaches”. Keep your eyes fixed on the new day ahead. Don't stop to mourn what could have been. Perhaps that's the secret to escaping the parallel dimension we've found ourselves trapped in.

“We’ve got to live in the moment”, to borrow the words of another of today's most inspired American songwriters, Simon Joyner, with his stripped-down songs for stolen guitars: once the tornado has passed, we'll see what's still standing. And even after a season in hell, as Jeff Tweedy sings on Wilco's generous return to their roots, we'll at least have a story to tell. We probably won't have come out better for it, but we might have learned something. Perhaps the lesson the Mountain Goats tucked in at the end of the fierce revenge fantasies of “Bleed Out”: “I’m gonna tell my friends to all go to hell/ And wish my enemies well”. Now that would already be a good way to stop looking back.

Marco Bercella

My personal selection of 40 songs taken from my 40 favorite albums of 2022, in…radio-friendly order, of course. Enjoy the listen!

Valerio D’Onofrio

Paolo Ciro

Matteo Contri

A hundred and one songs to retrace an extremely up-and-down 2022, with a small spoiler about my album of the year.

Michele Corrado

There are so many musical genres and scenes, both global and national, that one can follow today, and so many treasures that each of these fields holds, that every passing year it becomes harder to put together a playlist that's both concise and satisfying.

The only way to tackle a mission like this is to set strict rules for yourself. In my case, otherwise I'd never be done, I told myself "okay, 2022, only 22 songs". That's how this erratic, uninhibited run of tracks came about, one that couldn't care less about genres or boundaries, only about beauty and "stickiness".

I promise that next year I'll pick 23 tracks instead, and the year after that 24, and so on, until one day something stops me.

Giuliano Delli Paoli

We fly from the Mexico of Natalia Lafourcade to the Poland of Ralph Kaminski, and from the Franco-Belgian scene, in fine form – whether it's a magnificent comeback like Stromae's or an inviting surprise like the outgoing Lomepal's – all the way up to the dizzying mainstream numbers of Taylor Swift. Then there are the new mothers from Portland who keep the dream alive, like Alela Diane, and the timeless muses who instead long for maternal prosperity by pulling yet another gem out of the drawer, like the unreachable Lana Del Rey. In short, there's (almost) something for everyone, for an elusive yet dense year.

Claudio Fabretti

From the revelation of King Hannah to the crowning of Fontaines Dc. My "dirty thirty" is also a synthesis of my ranking of the albums I loved most this 2022. A selection that couldn't do without a substantial female presence, led by the wonderful Natalia Lafourcade with the title track of her exquisitely refined latest work, and made up of stars now of the first magnitude such as Anna Von Hausswolff (stunning live too, in this format), Angel Olsen (this time in country mode), Natalie Mering aka Weyes Blood (already album of the month on these pages) and the ever-versatile Cate Le Bon. Richer than usual, for my own habits, is the hip-hop section, with an all-French-language outpost formed by the duo Stromae–Lomepal (respectively the comeback and surprise of the year), plus the new feats of the razor-sharp Kae Tempest and the Danger Mouse-Black Thought tandem.

There's no shortage of heavy hitters either: The Weeknd, who never disappoints, the evergreen Suede and Beach House, the ineffable Alex Turner steering the increasingly sophisticated machine of his Arctic Monkeys, the The Smile take on the Radiohead gospel, guru Brian Eno, back to lending his voice to dense ambient textures, fellow electronic maestro Jean-Michel Jarre (another one who seems to refuse to age) and the now-veteran Porcupine Tree of Steven Wilson, whose return to the fray was one of the year's most welcome surprises. Manning the folk front instead are two rock-solid albums courtesy of Wilco and Big Thief. Rounding out the picture are the Italian revelations Messa (in the doom-metal realm) and Bruno Bavota (another album of the month) whose magic piano even bewitched Dutch artist Chantal Acda. And there's a touch of Italian too in the instrumental piece by Arnaud Rebotini: it is, in fact, the theme from the latest film by Dario Argento ("Occhiali neri"). In short, there's something for everyone... over to you for the listening.

A handful of songs, in no particular order, from a 2022 that, between absolute newcomers, comeback kids and welcome confirmations, gave us so much interesting music. I tried to put together a compilation of some of the tracks I listened to most often. It doesn't claim to be exhaustive. In some cases the songs come from records that didn't fully satisfy me. Conversely, albums I loved a great deal aren't represented in this list. To give it some semblance of order, I tried to arrange them by affinity, but they can be listened to in any sequence.

Finally, a special tribute to our own country with 5 tracks by Italian artists.

There were several albums this 2022 that I appreciated and played over and over again, yet paradoxically few individual tracks that truly got under my skin and made it into an ideal ranking of my all-time favorite songs. So I took refuge in the most brazen pop, the kind with soaring, maybe even slightly childish choruses, in bittersweet ballads with a '90s aftertaste, and in the by-now-unavoidable urban-pop crossover.

Fabio Guastalla

Vassilios Karagiannis

Faithful to the almost entirely self-imposed limit of 30 tracks, a playlist that tries to sketch a summary of the songs that most defined my 2022. One track per artist, with one obvious exception right from the start of the tracklist: PinkPantheress, the absolute ruler of the year now drawing to a close and a source of great hope for the one ahead. As for the rest: the best contribution from Floating Points in years (“Somewhere Near Marseilles” by Hikaru Utada), the few worthwhile moments of an otherwise pretty modest year for k-pop (the extraordinary energy of “Glitch” by Kwon Eun Bi and the sampling creativity of “Attention” by rookies NewJeans), plenty of tradition as orthodox as it is reinvented (“Time Escaping” from the consecration album by Big Thief; the rumba steps of “Como un guiri en Barcelona” by Diego Lorenzini), the new British jazz that manages to be more explosive and immediate than so much bland pop currently doing the rounds (see The Comet Is Coming), an explosion of tones and colours, less concerned with pinning down a precise centre of gravity than with highlighting the beauty of a musical universe increasingly uninterested in barriers and boundaries. That's enough for me.

Claudio Lancia

Here's a portion of my compulsive listening from 2022, arranged in a sequence loosely following my chart of favourite albums of the year. A leisurely journey through some of the albums I listened to, appreciated and loved most over the past twelve months. Listening back to it all in sequence leaves quite an impression: all things considered, the quality was extremely high once again this time round. Happy listening, and Happy New Year to everyone...

Alessandro Mattedi

Cristiano Orlando

Lorenzo Pagani

Damiano Pandolfini

Hello? It’s the coochie calling…

So much sadness, so much languor, and then so much urge to scream and to dance: thanks to Shygirl, Beyoncé and Rosalía for stirring up the waters, and to those born losers at 100% Silk for embroidering them. And thanks too to Loraine James, as lovingly warm and fitting as an embrace that never ends.

Federico Romagnoli

A pop, rock, rap, folk and jazz playlist, with the usual cosmopolitan flavour. A couple of essential tracks missing from Spotify should be added: “춤을 추어요 (Chumeul chueoyo / Let's Dance)” by Korean producer 250 and “Oppression Blues” by Tatsuro Yamashita.

Marco Sgrignoli

A selection for lovers of progressive music, in the broadest sense. Few, very few, revivalist sounds, and lots of genre-crossing exploration, built around a handful of pillars: harmonically rich pop, traditions from different corners of the world, contemporary jazz, and the alien sounds made possible by metal and electronic music.

As I did last year, I've split the playlist into two halves. One is devoted to songs, some with a distinctly pop bent (Stromae, Louis Cole, Harry Styles), others with a broader, more experimental horizon. The other set instead brings together tracks of a more markedly instrumental character, though not necessarily without vocal parts (the female voice plays an important role both in the deconstructed folktronica of Catalan artist Marina Herlop and in the jazz/traditional hybrids of Daniel Herskedal/Emilie Nicolas and Italy's own Rhabdomantic Orchestra). The two sections are linked by a run of tracks that is the most recognizably progressive of the bunch: Without Waves, Extra Life, CKRAFT and The Algorithm, all decidedly deep and metallic in tone, interspersed however with the jazzy flashes of Fievel Is Glauque.

Between afrobeat and Mediterranean echoes, soft/loud, nu jazz, singer-songwriter hip-hop and the tried-and-true certainties of stomp-rock, these twenty-five tracks touch on familiar names but, I hope, plenty of surprises too: my wish is that listening to it might spark curiosity and point toward new, exciting and current directions, even if far from the more well-trodden indie/alternative paths (albeit sometimes rather worn out).

Antonio Silvestri

I didn't want it to be simply a collection of tracks from my favorite albums of the year: I tried, but the playlist just didn't seem to work. Because if I put one of Galas's gargoyles right next to, say, a colossal track by White Ward, every rhythmic continuity snaps, the groove goes out the window, and on an emotional level too it becomes hard to move on to anything else afterwards.

This 50-track playlist, then, was built in an attempt to make room for all the great things heard and released in 2022, lined up in a mix of proven hits, delicious trash'n'kitsch, and connoisseur-grade refinements. Sometimes they're great songs from great records, other times they're the standout moments from less brilliant albums, and other times still they're curiosities or unexpected one-off hits. There's also a pinch of provocation, which in my opinion never hurts!

Maria Teresa Soldani

Martina Vetrugno

Ride the wave of great music

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12/01/2026