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RockerZ Top Spins for 2022

Ninety-nine tracks, no genre discipline, and a stubborn refusal to distinguish between a 1980 Stevie Wonder album cut and something released last month. This is what a year of actual listening looks like.

Not a chart, a diary

Most year-end lists are arguments. This one is a record — what actually got played, in whatever order it accumulated. That makes it considerably more useful than a critics' poll, because it shows how a real listening habit works: a handful of new discoveries, a returning core of older favourites, and a wide net across scenes that have no reason to sit together.

Ninety-nine tracks is roughly six hours. The independent and internationally sourced material outweighs the mainstream by a long way, which tells you where the curatorial attention actually goes.

What to listen for

Rema's "Calm Down" is the biggest record here by an enormous margin — it became one of the most-streamed African songs ever released, and its presence marks the year Afrobeats stopped needing an explanation.

Stevie Wonder's "All I Do" is the elder in the room, and Floetry and Common's "SupaStar" the neo-soul touchstone.

Cleo Sol's "Don't Let It Go to Your Head" and Mariah the Scientist's "Church" represent the two poles of contemporary R&B — one warm and unguarded, the other cool and slightly menacing.

The discoveries are the point. Dreamer Isioma's "Stop Calling The Police On Me" is a Nigerian-American artist making genre-fluid rock-soul, and the title is doing exactly what you think. LAYA's "Sailor Moon," Nia Sultana, Johnny Rain and Jean Deaux with Ambré are all worth chasing.

Tomi Agape's "London" and Juls and Mayra Andrade's "Love Language" map the Afro-diaspora side, and Dallas Tamaira — better known as Joe Dukie of Fat Freddy's Drop — brings New Zealand into it.

Tamera and Tay Iwar's "Good Love" and Gallant and Sabrina Claudio's "Compromise" are the smoothest things on the list.

Go deeper

Three from this to follow properly. Dreamer Isioma — genuinely doing something new. Tay Iwar — a Nigerian singer-producer whose Gemini is one of the best under-heard R&B records of recent years. Fat Freddy's Drop — the New Zealand band whose live shows are legendary and whose Based on a True Story remains extraordinary.

And the broader point: a hundred-track personal list assembled across a year will always beat an algorithm, because it contains the one thing recommendation systems cannot generate — a reason.

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