It's so ridiculous that SZA has been releasing a string of increasingly successful singles since 2020 and we're still waiting on TDE to give her album a release date. It's especially absurd because she was reduced to putting three songs on Soundcloud a few months ago and waiting for fan demand to build to release one of them officially. "I Hate U" even has a funky lo-fi Soundcloud sort of aesthetic to it, which I think makes it cool that this is the song that blew up. Here's my new 2022 singles Spotify playlist that I'll be adding songs to throughout the year. 

There was a lot of speculation about whether Adele would finally modernize her sound or try to play catch up with more contemporary-sounding pop stars on 30, and I was happy with her releasing a very traditional piano ballad lead single and then having some mildly novel sounds on the album. "Oh My God" stands out in the context of an Adele album -- within a few days of the album coming out and fan favorites emerging, her label switched plans from "I Drink Wine" to "Oh My God" for the second single -- but on pop radio it just sounds like a really good but not particularly unusual song. 

Something For The Hotties didn't get too much attention as sort of a stopgap mixtape thing, but it was in my top 10 albums of the year and it really might be my favorite Megan project, just all aggressive beats and shit talking bars and no features. And "Megan's Piano" is a good breakout single for it, under 2 minutes and with an amazing minimalist piano beat (one of my local Top 40 stations does a drivetime dance mix and one time they played "Megan's Piano" with a generic EDM beat and it kinda kicked ass). But what I really like it the weird way she inverts that early 2010s Young Money/Big Sean punchline style, putting the punchline phrase at the beginning rather than the end of the line ("teacup / I can fit a bitch in my purse"). 

Kane Brown has been making inroads to pop crossover in the last few years and "Be Like That" with Swae Lee and Khalid was pretty good. And in 2021 he released two singles that probably set up a two-pronged approach for his 3rd album. "Memory" is mediocre pop radio fodder with Blackbear, but "One Mississippi" is his best country single since "Good As You," big effective chorus (despite its passing resemblance to Luke Bryan's bad 2020 hit "One Margarita") and a nice climactic guitar solo. 

Really looking forward to Lucky Daye's next album, feels like he's ready to make a big jump commercially, and as usual D'Mile's production is fantastic. 

Cole Swindell's "Single Saturday Night" and Lainey Wilson's "Things A Man Oughta Know" were both high on my 2021 singles list, and their voices sound good together on a duet. 

I could never quite make up my mind whether I liked Parker McCollum's breakthrough hit "Pretty Heart" or not, catchy song but his voice was just so whiny. It's still whiny on "To Be Loved By You," but in a weird way it works better because the lyric is kind of needy and self-pitying. 

I don't really care enough about Taylor Swift to listen to the re-recordings of her old albums, and find the excitement around them and that overstuffed longer version of "All Too Well" kind of baffling. But I do think Red is one of her best albums, perhaps her very best, and it is nice to hear some outtakes from back when she was doing the pop crossover thing well before Reputation. Apparently the original unreleased "Message In A Bottle" was the first song she made with Max Martin and I'm kind of surprised it didn't make the cut originally, it's a little anonymous but much catchier and better than "22." 

French Montana isn't the star he once was, but he can still manage to put together a pretty good single if some guest rappers and a sample from a NYC rap classic can carry it for him. I don't know why Doja Cat's guest verses are so much better than the rap bits on her own songs now. 

As I wrote yesterday, I really enjoyed Encanto and its songs, and "We Don't Talk About Bruno" was the song that really got stuck in my head immediate the first time my kid watched it, although "Surface Pressure" was the one he started singing around the house right off the bat (between my two kids I think I've seen it at least 4 times now). So I'm pretty delighted about the surprise viral success of "Bruno," I heard it on a Top 40 station for the first time the other night and it actually worked pretty well in a radio context. 

After Imanbek/SAINt JHN and HVME/Travis Scott hits, house remixes of rap songs appear to be an ongoing pop radio trend, and now we've got this horrible flattening new version of Cherish's 2006 crunk & B chestnut that might be the nadir of the whole weird phenomenon. 

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