New Salvation – The Top 100 Songs of 2022
Queen Bey’s superlative, “Renaissance” LP would walk away with our album of the year, boasting an unprecedented six songs that were selected by multiple panelists!
Our official 2022 playlist, “New Salvation” is here!
Dedicated BAS followers might recall this massive playlist we put together at the close of 2019 chronicling a decade’s worth of standout songs. That project proved to be both a blast to create and a valued artifact to revisit frequently. Since then, we’ve convened a panel of passionate music nerds, critics, and creators at the close of each year and tasked them with producing a much more manageably-sized list of that year’s best tunes. At the close of 2020 they gave us their first 100-song playlist, titled “Only Leading Me To That,” a year ago they delivered “I Might Buy A Boat,” The Top 100 Songs of 2021, and as 2022 comes to a close we’ve invited them back to do it again!
The process of building one of these year-end playlists begins with each contributor submitting a list of their top songs of the year. This year we had about a dozen contributors, some local musicians, others music educators, as well as culture writers and BAS contributors. With this larger panel, a much larger portion of this year’s list (almost 80 tunes) came out of consensus, while the remaining songs were added by an individual champion making an impassioned case.
If we were to name a song of the year, “Bad Habits” by Steve Lacy would take that crown. This ultra-catchy synth-funk earworm ended up on seven of our contributor’s lists this year. Beyonce’s “Cuff It” was right behind with six selections. Queen Bey’s superlative, “Renaissance” LP would walk away with our album of the year, boasting an unprecedented six songs that were selected by multiple panelists!
If you are one who just can’t get enough new music, or who loves what a massive, eclectic playlist can do for your algorithm, check out this list for all 655 tracks that were placed into consideration this year!
You can check out the playlist of all 655 songs right here:
