The 20 Best Rock/Alternative Radio Hits of 2022
Here's the Spotify playlist, this concludes my big yearly run of genre lists, following rap, pop, R&B, and country.
1. Paramore - "This Is Why"
#3 Alternative Airplay, #6 Rock & Alternative Airplay
Back in the late 2000s when I fell in love with Paramore's early albums, a lot of my peers thought they were kid stuff and preferred hip post-punk bands like Bloc Party and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. So it brings up some complicated emotions to see that Paramore is a more respected band now, but they're very influenced by stuff like Bloc Party and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs in their later work. But listen, I'll take it, I'm just glad that Paramore are still making awesome music, and actually got their first top 10 alt-rock radio hit since 2009 with "This Is Why." When my local station plays it, they edit out the spacey first 15 seconds of the track and skip to when the bassline comes in, but it kinda works that way too.
2. Sam Fender - "Seventeen Going Under"
#19 Alternative Airplay, #19 Rock & Alternative Airplay
I really enjoyed Sam Fender's second album Seventeen Going Under when it came out last year, but I didn't become a complete maniac for the title track until it started to get some American radio play. If I had completely blown out my car speakers around March, it would've been because of this song.
3. Jack White - "Taking Me Back"
#2 Alternative Airplay, #2 Mainstream Rock Airplay, #1 Rock & Alternative Airplay
It surprised me how much I ended up talking about Jack White this year, reviewing one of his 2022 albums for Consequence and the other for NPR. But I've really warmed up to him over the years, and my favorite solo single from White, "Taking Me Back," has some of the same skronky, unhinged energy as my favorite White Stripes single, "Icky Thump."
4. Metallica - "Lux Aeterna"
#2 Mainstream Rock Airplay, #35 Alternative Airplay, #2 Rock & Alternative Airplay
A lot of my opinions about Metallica probably seem perversely contrarian -- I have no problem with The Black Album, I love LULU, I think the snare on St. Anger is cool -- so maybe I'll be looked at as insane for saying this is their best single since "Fuel." But I love how fast and concise it is, the last couple albums had their moments but were so longwinded, 3-minute Metallica songs are cool.
5. Turnstile - "Mystery"
#8 Alternative Airplay, #16 Mainstream Rock Airplay, #12 Rock & Alternative Airplay
Maybe I'm just used to seeing great Baltimore bands toil in obscurity, but I continue to be amazed and surprised by the scale of Turnstile's success almost every day, whether they're getting a few Grammy nominations or an opening slot on Blink-182's arena tour. But with "Holiday" now climbing the charts, Glow On is on its 3rd radio hit, which was really something I didn't see coming, although it makes total sense to me that "Mystery" was the biggest of those hits.
6. Maggie Rogers - "Want Want"
#11 Alternative Airplay, #16 Rock & Alternative Airplay
I've got a little local pride at seeing Maggie Rogers thrive too, since she's from the Eastern shore of Maryland. But I love the way Kid Harpoon (the guy behind all the Harry Styles solo records) kind of nudged her sound just slightly in a more radio-friendly direction, "Want Want" has a lot of the melody and texture of early Maggie Rogers songs with a more propulsive beat and anthemic chorus.
7. The 1975 - "I'm In Love With You"
#8 Alternative Airplay, #17 Rock & Alternative Airplay
Although The 1975 have broken America in a lot of ways (#1 album, selling out Madison Square Garden, etc.), they're not nearly as successful as a singles act here as they are in the UK. They've only had three top 10 hits on alternative radio, but together, those songs ("Somebody Else," "I'd Love It If We Made It," and "I'm In Love With You") kind of triangulate the band's range pretty well, which is cool.
8. Cafune - "Tek It"
#5 Alternative Airplay, #7 Rock & Alternative Airplay
Noah Yoo is a talented music critic and he and I follow each other on twitter. So it's been cool to see his band Cafune blow up on TikTok with this song and now it's spread to radio too, I can't get enough of the "I watch the moooooon" hook and how over-the-top the AutoTune is on the outro.
9. Wilderado - "Head Right"
#10 Alternative Airplay, #25 Rock & Alternative Airplay
Most or all of the songs on my other genre lists are things I've actually heard on the radio this year, but that's not as much the case with this list. That's mainly because there's only one alt-rock station in the area that I can listen to in the car, DC101, and they really don't play a lot of new music, sometimes a song will get to #1 on the national alternative chart before I hear it. So there are some top 10 hits that I didn't hear until I was going through the last year of Billboard charts and checking out stuff for this list, and one of those is the Oklahoma band Wilderado.
10. Marcus Mumford - "Grace"
#16 Alternative Airplay, #27 Rock & Alternative Airplay
I was never big on Mumford & Sons, but they had their moments, "The Wolf" was pretty good. I guess it was a good time for Marcus Mumford to step away from the band after they had to kick out their banjo player who turned out to be a far right shithead. But I didn't check out his solo record, and then I heard a little of "Grace" on the radio one day and was just blown away. Blake Mills has produced quite a few good records over the last decade but it feels like he pulled out his entire bag of tricks just for this song, it sounds incredible.
11. Giovannie & The Hired Guns - "Ramon Ayala"
#3 Alternative Airplay, #2 Mainstream Rock Airplay, #1 Rock & Alternative Airplay
It was kind of a fun melting pot moment when the most old-school grungy guitar rock hit on alternative radio this past summer was a Texas band that uses hip hop slang to namecheck one of the biggest accordionists in traditional Mexican music ("I still bump Ramon Ayala when I get drunk").
12. Bob Moses - "Love Brand New"
#1 Alternative Airplay, #3 Rock & Alternative Airplay
People, particularly New Yorkers and particularly the kind of nerds who care enough about city infrastructure to have an opinion about a long-dead urban planner, hate Robert Moses. But this Canadian duo decided to name their band after him for some reason. I didn't think much of their two earlier minor radio hits, but "Love Brand New" really felt like the big gleaming anthem where everything clicked into place. It's easily the best #1 on alternative radio in a year where the top spot has mostly been occupied by super famous bands coasting (RHCP, Imagine Dragons, Weezer, The Black Keys, Twenty One Pilots, Death Cab For Cutie) and pretty annoying newer acts (BoyWithUke, Maneskin, Beach Weather).
13. Mother Mother - "Hayloft II"
#29 Alternative Airplay
Apparently the British Columbian band Mother Mother are pretty well established up in Canada with over a decade of charting songs. But they got a bit of American radio exposure after some of their music trended on TikTok and they released a new sequel to one of their earliest hits, 2009's "Hayloft." It's weird to get on board of anything with a sequel but damn "Hayloft II" is great and makes me want to check out more of their stuff.
14. d4vd - "Romantic Homicide"
#30 Alternative Airplay, #33 Hot 100
The biggest Hot 100 song of 2022 may have started out as an alternative hit (I'm referring of course to the song that just won't go away, "Heat Waves" by Glass Animals). But other than that and, inevitably, an Imagine Dragons song, practically nothing on alternative radio broke through enough on a wider level this year, and "Romantic Homicide" is the only song on this list that charted on the Hot 100. And even that is mainly because alternative radio is slowly picking up on d4vd, a 17-year-old kid who started making music to soundtrack his Fortnite montage videos, after his breakthrough single was big online. It's pretty good, he's got potential.
15. Inhaler - "Cheer Up Baby"
#33 Alternative Airplay, #43 Rock & Alternative Airplay
Inhaler are another act I never heard of before I found their song on the radio charts, but apparently they're an Irish band that topped the UK album charts, so they're a big deal over there.
16. Foo Fighters - "Love Dies Young"
#6 Alternative Airplay, #3 Mainstream Rock Airplay, #3 Rock & Alternative Airplay
There's often something poignant, or ironic, or otherwise noteworthy about the hit that a musician happened to have on the charts at the moment of their death. But it made me cringe that "Love Dies Young" was the current Foo Fighters single when Taylor Hawkins died in March. It had always been one of my favorite songs on Medicine At Midnight, but the song isn't really about death and it almost felt in poor taste to hear it a lot in those weeks after he passed. I've started to come around to enjoying it again lately, though.
17. Ripe - "Settling"
#29 Alternative Airplay, #46 Rock & Alternative Airplay
This band have this dorky hippie vibe that takes me back to the days of Blues Traveler and Counting Crows. But those bands had some damn good singles, and "Settling" is really, really catchy, love that little horn section bit.
18. Coldplay - "People of the Pride"
#22 Alternative Airplay, #41 Rock & Alternative Airplay
Coldplay has reached out of the rock realm to collaborate with a wide variety of artists over the years, with mixed results. And 2021's Music Of The Spheres felt like the point where they finally took that stuff too far on songs with BTS and Max Martin and Selena Gomez. But there was some good stuff on that album, including the surprisingly heavy "People of the Pride" -- I know 'hardest rocking Coldplay song' sounds like an oxymoron like 'jumbo shrimp,' but that's a great riff, reminds me a bit of "Personal Jesus."
19. Jimmy Eat World - "Something Loud"
#21 Alternative Airplay, #28 Rock & Alternative Airplay
It kind of felt like the When We Were Young Festival was the biggest galvanizing force in mainstream rock music in 2022, building on the momentum of the 'pop punk revival' of recent years by bringing a ton of Warped Tour era punk and emo bands together for a huge nostalgic bill in Vegas. And that feeling in the air seemed to spur a lot of acts to release new music this year, but the anticipation for When We Were Young also directly inspired the best Jimmy Eat World single in over a decade, a wizened anthem about getting older and still getting excited about the music you loved as a teenager.
20. My Chemical Romance - "The Foundations Of Decay"
#10 Alternative Airplay, #21 Mainstream Rock Airplay, #16 Rock & Alternative Airplay
My Chemical Romance were one of the headliners of When We Were Young this year, and their reunion tour was a big part of that wave of 2000s nostalgia. But MCR never fit too comfortably in the confines of the emo scene and spent most of their career confounding expectations and following their own unpredictable muse. So it felt perversely appropriate that the band's first new song in almost a decade was a slow, sludgy, 6-minute epic that barely resembled anything from the band's original run.
The 10 Worst Rock/Alternative Radio Hits of 2022:
1. I Prevail - "Bad Things"
2. BoyWithUke - "Toxic"
3. Imagine Dragons f/ JID - "Enemy"
4. Rex Orange County - "Keep It Up"
5. Gorillaz f/ Thundercat - "Cracker Island"
6. Muse - "Compliance"
7. Ghost - "Call Me Little Sunshine"
8. Blink-182 - "Edging"
9. Glass Animals - "I Don't Wanna Talk (I Just Wanna Talk)"
10. Machine Gun Kelly f/ Willow - "Emo Girl"
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on Thursday, December 08, 2022 at 2:02 PM.
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