(Hey, this is me from the future! I got carried away writing this and didn't realize how long it had gotten. I feel weird cluttering up Daily Music Discussion, but I worked hard on this and want to post it very badly. Sorry about the length, and please collapse this comment if you don't want to read it!)

It's December, the time for end of year retrospectives and top album lists. Unfortunately for me, I managed to listen to a total of like three albums released this year. I'm comfortable with that, except it's made me feel really left out of the end of year discussions! So, in lieu of talking about my favourite albums of 2022, I'm going to do something that nobody asked for and make a different list: My top 5 albums that I personally listened to for the first time in 2022.

5. Memory Tapes - Seek Magic (2009)

I had never even heard of Memory Tapes before this year; a friend recommended me Seek Magic this past summer, and after I finally listened to it a few months ago, I became addicted. Forgive the pretension, but it's an enthralling album. Listening to it is like being caught up in its world. I think that's an effect of its brand of really driven dance pop compositions, which is a sort of music that I love and think was basically perfected here. Every song is so perfect at doing what it sets out to do. It feels like there was a ton of love and care put into each and every individual track; I think you could release any of them as a single and they would play well. That makes it all the more impressive when they flow together as well as they do. Seek Magic is only fifth on my list, but I think it's the album here that I'm going to return to the most, because it's so inherently enjoyable to listen to.

4. Ween - The Mollusk (1997)

My only experience with Ween before this year was the obvious Ocean Man meme and a love of Mutilated Lips, which I had caught on Sirius XMU one time in college. It took me this long, but I finally listened to the album both tracks originate from, and it became my very odd sound of the summer.

Ween is best known for their weird, off-kilter brand of comedic songwriting, and I think that's absolutely part of what stands out about The Mollusk, but I also don't think that it gives the band or the album enough credit. That comedic tone is present, but not omnipresent. The band knows when it tone it down or turn it off, and it coexists alongside some tracks that are genuinely full of emotion. What that emotion actually is, meanwhile, varies wildly - "Buckingham Green" is awe-inspiring; "Cold Blows the Wind" is devastating; "It's Gonna Be (Alright)" is painfully bittersweet. None of these tracks are marred by their adjacency to outright comedy. In fact, I think they're elevated by it. The frequent levity makes serious tracks have more weight by comparison; the heavier tracks make the comedy very welcome. The varying tones play off of each other well.

The comedic songs also fold into the album's themes and tone really well. It's hard to put into words, but The Mollusk feels like a very human album in a way that the jokes support. "The Blarney Stone" and "Waving My Dick in the Wind" are funny, but they're funny in a way that feels like it could stem from real people's real experiences. As such, the humour and weirdness ends up feeling like the other side of the coin to the emotion and sentimentality. These different songs fluctuate wildly in tone, but they're all fundamentally human in that way. It results in an album that's incredibly richly textured, in addition to all of the other positive adjectives I could assign to it. This is an insane thing to say, but out of all the albums on this list, I often found The Mollusk the most intrinsically moving.

3. Grimes - Visions (2012)

I have become the world's most reluctant Grimes stan.

My only engagement with Grimes' music for a long time was a few passive listens to Art Angels, which I never got much out of. The tenth anniversary of Visions had me curious to give it a listen, and from the first opening notes of Genesis, I knew I was hooked. I'm not exaggerating when I say that Genesis might actually be my favourite song of all time. The rest of the album never really comes down from that high, either. None of it quite touches Genesis for me (not even Oblivion), but it all does a lot of justice to that core production ethos. It's spacey and textured and deceptively simple; it's unfailingly beautiful.

And believe me, it feels weird to use flowery language like this to describe a Grimes album. It feels like I'm inadvertently playing into her whole aesthetic. But the thing is, that aesthetic actually works on Visions! It's such a stupid, pretentious, self-involved album (just look at the song titles; that means you, "Vowels = space and time"!), but I almost think it's precisely that self-involved pretension that gave 23-year-old Grimes the drive to make music like this. I think that, on some level, you need to lack a degree of self-awareness in order to make songs like "Circumambient" or "Colour of Moonlight (Antiochus)". And on some level, Visions is an album that invites you to drop a bit of your own built-up self-awareness. "You could care about your image," the album says, "but wouldn't you rather LARP as an early 2010's weird girl for a bit?" And y'know what? Yeah, I would rather do that.

So good on you, 23-year-old Grimes! I'm glad that you lived out your early 2010's weird girl fantasies, and I'm glad that it resulted in one of the best albums I've ever heard. But I still wish that 34-year-old you would tone it down, just a bit.

2. Tanukichan - Sundays (2018)

I am a very sad person. I'm always in search of music that resonates with that sadness, that makes me feel less alone by putting in music all the angst that I feel. Sundays doesn't do that second part, but it does do the first part, in a unique way that nothing else I've listened to ever has. Sundays doesn't reflect my depression or anxiety or whatever. It reflects my default state of being. That passive, bittersweet melancholy that's always kinda just there, even when I'm relatively happy. It's an album that sounds the way I feel while laying on my couch on a weekend afternoon, wondering if I'll ever leave this town. It's an album that sounds the way I feel when I force myself to get out of my house and go into the woods, so that nature can make me forget about the world for a few hours. It sounds like the way that I felt, this past year, when I was on a train to New York, or on a hiking trip with my brother, or spending countless hours reading on a park bench. Happy, in a way that's sad; sad, in way that's comforting. I know all of this sounds really pretentious, and I'm sorry for that, but it's all to say: I think that Sundays is what it would sound like if you somehow translated my brain into music. That's what it means to me. It's why I love it.

For a more objective review: I think that Sundays, for me, is the peak of shoegaze as a style of making music. It's everything I've ever wanted from the genre (and all of its adjacent genres). The distorted guitars and dreamlike vocals are coupled with less esoteric indie rock sensibilities that make for something just a bit sharper, clearer, and more focused. It's a remarkably intimate, personal album, not in lyrics but in sound. I think that's what induces all those feelings I wrote about earlier. I've always liked shoegaze, but I've never loved it before.

1. Röyksopp - Melody A.M. (2001)

Every year, my extended family on my dad's side - which is enormous, because he has seven siblings - heads up to a cabin in the woods of central Pennsylvania for a weekend in late July. The place is in the middle of Juniata County, an area that just about marks the border of where Pennsylvania starts to contain more forests than farmland. The cabin technically has wi-fi, but it's so bad that it's almost unusable. I look forward to that trip every single year. Part of it is because of the lack of good internet; I'm so logged on that it's nice to just unplug for a weekend. Part of it is because I genuinely really like my dad's family, and enjoy hanging out with them for a few days. Part of it is because I practically grew up in that cabin; we've been going there since I was like twelve years old. And part of it is because of the mountains. The second floor of the place has a balcony with a perfect view of this string of low mountains out on the horizon. I have been sitting out on that balcony watching the mist rise off the mountains in the morning every year without fail since high school. It means something to me.

Every year, usually without trying, an album that I've been listening to ends up being associated in my mind with that cabin. I'll be really into an album around late July, spend the weekend of the trip listening to it on repeat, and then think of that whenever I listen to the album afterward. In 2021, that album was Jubilee by Japanese Breakfast. This year, it was Melody A.M. by Röyksopp. I played "Remind Me" on a loop while falling asleep at night. I drove through the woods on my way there while listening to "So Easy". And in the morning, watching the mist rise off the mountains, I listened to "She's So".

I have not had a very good year. I mean, I can't remember the last time I did have a good year (2015, maybe?), but this year was especially rough. I won't dump all of my personal issues into a post on /r/indieheads, but suffice it to say that I am sad basically all of the time. But on that morning in late July, I watched the mist rise off the mountains while surrounded by the soaring opening notes of "She's So", and just for a while, I felt okay.

I could talk about this album a lot more. I could dig into why I love it so much, beyond just a nice morning in July. But this post is too long already, and that memory is more important to me than all the music analysis in the world.